


























V. 


Book 



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OUR AMBIGUOUS LIFE 







But 1 d Love thee ! and when I love thee not 
Chaos is come again. 


OUR AMBIGUOUS LIFE 



JOHN AT HUTTON, D.D. 

U 

AUTHOR OF “ DISCERNING THE TIMES,” 

“THE PERSISTENT WORD OF GOD,” ETC. 


BOSTON : THE PILGRIM PRESS 
LONDON: JAMES CLARKE & CO., LIMITED 

PRINTED IN ENGLAND 




( 


£>^\£5 

.V\ 








CONTENTS 


I 

“ THUS SAITH THE LORD ” 

PAGE 

7 

II 

SUNRISE 

r 4 

III 

HOW THERE ARE PLACES IN WHICH THE 



ANGRY QUESTION IS NOT PUT 

21 

IV 

PROVERBS AND A PROVERB 

27 

V 

NATURE AND NURTURE 

36 

VI 

THE RELIEF OF ACTION 

47 

VII 

REVIVAL THE ONE THING ASSURED 

54 

VIII 

A DAY IN A THOUSAND 

63 

IX 

SILENCE 

7i 

X 

AN ECHO OF THE TEMPTATION 

79 

XI 

THE LATER DEMAND OF LIFE 

85 

XII 

“ HOW MANY LOAVES HAVE YE ? ” 

94 

XIII 

how what’s IN COMES OUT 

106 

XIV 

“ THOU SHALT KNOW HEREAFTER ” 

IJ 4 

XV 

s. Paul’s decision in a crisis 

121 

XVI 

STRENGTH MADE PERFECT IN WEAKNESS 

129 

XVII 

FAITH THE REFUGE FROM ANXIETY 

►H 

'-a 

XVIII 

“ TAKE THY SHARE OF HARDNESS ” 

148 


Contents 


PAGE 


XIX 

THE INVITATION OF EASTER 

160 

XX 

FROM EASTER TO PENTECOST IN THE 

REGION OF THE SOUL 

170 

XXI 

“ FOLLOW ME AND LEAVE THE DEAD TO 
BURY THEIR OWN DEAD ” 

178 

XXII 

FAITH OUR DEFENCE AGAINST CON- 
DITIONS 

190 

XXIII 

THE PARTING OF FRIENDS 

200 

XXIV 

THE SOUL AT EBB-TIDE 

208 

XXV 

“ AND AGAIN, PATIENCE ” 

220 

XXVI 

“ LORD, TO WHOM SHALL WE GO ? ” 

231 

XXVII 

Christ’s inevitable prestige 

236 

XXVIII 

“ if it were not so ! ” 

244 


I 


“THUS SAITH THE LORD ” 

In the story of the Fall, as we have it in the third 
chapter of Genesis, there is a point which we must 
not miss. The serpent, who there incarnates the 
Evil Spirit, draws near to the woman and begins to 
tempt her with these words, “ Yea, hath God said 
ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden ? ” He 
begins his assault upon her integrity by insinuating 
that the woman has laid a law upon herself ; that 
this law has no force except the force of her own fear 
and imagination ; that she is afraid of her own 
shadow. His first effort, that is to say, is to persuade 
the woman that she is answerable only to herself, 
that the law which he is asking her to break is a law 
of her own making. However men in our own day 
may speak of “ revelation ” as though it did not 
matter whether we believe that God has spoken or 
not, the tempter understood very well that if he 
could once get the woman to believe that it was her 
own voice which she had been thinking was the 
Voice of God, the citadel of her resistance would 
be undermined. 


7 


Our Ambiguous Life 

It makes all the difference in the world to us when 
we believe that God has spoken, that He has inter- 
rupted His own life, that He has in some way broken 
the immense silence, to give us direct and unmistak- 
able orders. In that case we have but one thing to 
do — to obey. It may be said, “ But surely the 
voice of conscience is strong enough to direct us ” ; 
or “ Surely it is a far loftier kind of life which one 
leads when he is guided, rebuked, inspired by his 
own personal reasons.” And yet I doubt whether 
conscience would persist in man, whether 
it would survive its own disasters and backslidings 
if there were no authority outside itself to which 
it returned and before which it bowed. It is true 
we resent the authority of another will. We prefer 
to think that we are obeying an inward voice and are 
being moved by our own private reasons. It 
humbles and irritates us, until we become religious, 
— after which it is the source of our peace — to 
know that it has been laid down in plain English 
what we must do if we are to please God. Whether 
men could go on or would go on in a steady and 
increasing obedience to God, if they no longer 
believed that He had spoken to them in some 
supreme way, is a question which is often discussed 
in books. But in practice, in actual life, we have 
answered the question. We act in the belief that 
the conscience is not sufficient for itself, but needs 
first and last the suggestion and rebuke and judgment 
of some authority related to it but superior. We 
8 


“Thus saith the Lord 


do not, if we are wise, permit our children to act 
according to their own sense of what is right and 
wrong. We tell them what is right and bid them 
do it ; we tell them what is wrong and bid them 
avoid it. We do not believe that they know 
naturally what is right and wrong. But we do 
believe that those words “ right ” and “ wrong ” 
have a meaning for them, that there is a place within 
them where such words awaken echoes, and that 
these things, the words and the echoes, go to the 
forming of a conscience or moral habit. We 
announce laws and rules of conduct to children long 
before they understand the value of them or the 
reasons for them, believing that if they obey steadily 
they will themselves discover how good and neces- 
sary those laws are. It is our hope with regard to 
children that as they grow older and make trial of 
those laws, both in the way of obedience and of 
disobedience, they will end by obeying them, not 
because they have been commanded so to do but 
because the laws have won the assent of their heart 
and mind. We come into the world as little with 
a full-grown and correct conscience as with full- 
grown limbs or the power to judge distances. And 
this we all admit and act upon ; for we should as 
soon permit children to do what they like as we 
should permit them to eat what they like. 

It is well for us who are no longer children in 
years and in experience, that certain things have been 
enforced, and certain things forbidden ; that 
9 


Our Ambiguous Life 

certain things have been placed beyond question or 
dispute. For concerning them God has said, 
“ Thou shalt,” or “ Thou shalt not.” 

We all know what a power one has to browbeat 
his conscience until it agrees with his inclinations. 
How easy it is to find reasons for doing what we 
would like to do and what we are determined to 
do! How easily we can prove to ourselves that 
although as a rule what we have done is wrong, 
yet the circumstances in our particular case were 
peculiar and made it necessary for us to do what we 
did ! Therefore, I say it is well for us who do not 
wish to deceive ourselves, that God has made 
certain things plain, forbidding this, demanding 
that. 

We would like to do something, let us say. 
When we first propose it to ourselves we shrink. 
It seems quite plainly wrong. Soon, however, we 
return to it. We are excited or angry or reckless. 
We do not see things calmly and as they are. For 
the moment we cannot imagine what our feelings 
will be when the thing has been done. We decide 
to do it. Then we see reason upon reason why we 
should do it, so that we wonder why we ever hesi- 
tated. And yet all the time it is wrong. Now what 
a deliverance it is to the soul of a man when he sees 
that the course he had almost set out upon runs 
right in the teeth of some word of God, say one 
of the ten commandments ! What a deliverance 
when one of God’s words comes crashing through 
io 


“ Thus saith the Lord 


our miserable arguments and subtleties and gives 
the thing we proposed its true name ! 


God has left us great fields of liberty. Concerning 
many things He has left us to ourselves, to our 
instincts and natural reason, in order that we may 
grow in wisdom by experience and even through our 
own mistakes, as a child learns to walk by walking. 
But there are some things concerning which He has 
spoken. We have been admitted, so to speak, 
into a chemist’s laboratory. There are bottles 
everywhere, on the floor, on the tables, on the 
shelves. As we entered we had a general warning 
from the chemist to take care. We open a bottle 
here and there, taking a taste of this and a smell of 
that. Sometimes it is unpleasant, sometimes 
painful ; sometimes the pungency of it pierces us 
like a knife. We lay these bottles down again ; 
we are not much the worse and we have learned that 
those things are not for us. But there are certain 
other bottles, blue bottles, with the word “ Poison ” 
marked in red. To taste these is to die, or it is to 
lose something for ever. Just so, God has turned 
us abroad into life, leaving us to our own incli- 
nations on many matters, leaving us to decide by 
the taste and by the after-taste of certain things 
whether they are safe and good for us or not. But 
there are certain matters about which a man is 
not permitted to have his own private opinion. 


it 


Our Ambiguous Life 

There are certain things demanded, and there are 
certain things forbidden. And if a man will go 
against God’s Word upon those things, making his 
own experiments in fields which God has closed, 
he does so at his peril. 

For those who believe in a personal God, there is 
no difficulty, except indeed the strain involved 
in all high ways of thinking, in believing that God 
has spoken and still speaks. I can believe that the 
effort of all God’s dealings with the race through 
the ages has been to disclose to us, not only a word 
here and there, not only a gleam now and then ; but 
one day to give us a steady and complete revelation 
of His whole heart and mind — that the Word would 
become incarnate and dwell amongst us. 

In a most pathetic passage in Plato we are told 
that in face of the great darkness and mysteriousness 
which are round about us in this world, there 
is nothing for a man to do except to take the best 
advice he can get as to how to live, and then take 
his chance — like a man crossing the lonely sea upon 
a raft ; “ unless,” he concludes, we can find some 
vessel more safe and solid, some word of God on 
which we may make this passage more securely.” 

It was into such a twilight and ambiguity that 
the Lord Jesus Christ came. And still there is no 
victory over this world, no light upon its final 
mysteriousness, no support for our apparent insigni- 
ficance face to face with an overwhelming and 
regardless universe ; no rock on which to plant our 
12 


“Thus saith the Lord 


feet ’mid the ebb and flow of mood and feeling, of 
doubt and hope and doubt again, except by 
a humble and tenacious faith which we allow day 
by day to recall us and to sustain us, that the 
Eternal God is our Refuge and underneath are 
Everlasting Arms. 


13 


II 


SUNRISE 

The story of the Destruction of the Cities of the 
Plain is full of moral matter which men and societies 
in all ages will do well to ponder. It describes the 
collapse of an entire historical period. It repre- 
sents, so to speak, one huge experiment in human 
society — the attempt on the part of a people to 
live together without the rebuke and control of any 
Holy and Saving Faith, each for his own pleasure, 
on a frankly sensual basis. The story describes that 
experiment and the collapse and extinction of that 
people in fire and flood. 

Out of the ruins a remnant was saved, and of the 
remnant was Lot. 

Warned by supernatural voices, terror-stricken 
at the appalling lengths to which evil had gone — 
evil also which in its fainter and less explicit begin- 
nings he himself had seemed to approve — Lot, 
obeying perhaps some reminiscence of his own better 
days, had fled from Sodom as the bolts from heaven 
began to strike the doomed place. All through the 
night, it would appear, he fled with the crash and 
glare of that God-forsaken place behind him. In 
the grey of the dawn he and his companions saw 
14 


Sunrise 


before them a little village which seemed to nestle 
in security. Into this place they gladly and 
weariedly entered. The name of the place was 
Zoar. And we read that when Lot entered into 
Zoar the Sun came out. 

I am quite sure that what the writer means to 
tell us is not simply that it was morning when Lot 
entered into this haven out of the shame of Sodom 
and the terror of his escape. What he means to 
tell us is not the time of day but the state of Lot’s 
own soul. For after all, it is our soul which decides 
always whether or not the Sun is risen upon the 
earth. The Sun cannot properly be said to rise 
upon the earth except it rise also in our heart. 
The Sun rises in vain for me if my heart is in gloom : 
whereas, if the Sun rise in my heart, I can by the 
power of my own happiness turn darkness to 
day. For a man’s view is determined by his point 
of view : and with regard to life, our point of view 
is determined by our experience and mood. 

Whether we see the Sun risen upon the earth 
depends scarcely at all on whether the Sun is actually 
abroad : it depends almost entirely upon the state 
of our heart, upon the glory or gloom of our inward 
life. And so they are not far wrong who declare 
that there is no such thing as an outward fact. 
There are only our apprehensions of facts ; and what 
these apprehensions shall be depends upon what in 
the matter of character and faith we ourselves are. 
Difficulty is not a thing outside of us. Difficulty 
15 


Our Ambiguous Life 

is a mood and decision of the soul : it is a temporary 
acknowledgment of defeat. And so, we might go 
on until we came to ultimate matters and say with 
regard to them this : — that we believe or disbelieve 
in God, not in consequence of the facts of the world 
but according to the facts of our own moral and 
emotional history. 

“ Perhaps in his youth one dreamed a dream : 
but the world mocked him and so he determined 
to dream no more. Or he aimed at something and 
he missed it. Or he trusted a friend and was 
betrayed. Or he loved a woman and she died : 
or bitterer still, she broke her word, or he broke his — 
and the light that was in him became darkness.” 
But always it is our private and inmost attitude to 
life, our victory over or prostration under the surge 
of personal circumstance, which decides for us 
whether the Sun has arisen upon the earth and we 
have the day before us, or has gone down behind 
great clouds in a haggard sky. “ Keep thy heart 
with all diligence, for out of the heart are the issues 
of life ” : so says a verse of Holy Scripture. And 
there is no issue to be compared with the issue to 
the question which life soon or late raises in every 
soul as to whether this earth is for ever bathed 
in the light of a holy meaning, or is but a senseless 
planet without significance, irrelevant to the mind 
of man. 

Now there are moods of the soul consequent 
upon certain experiences which have power to bring 
16 


Sunrise 


out the Sun. There are moments, hours, days, in 
which, unless we have lost something which we must 
not lose, else all is lost, the Sun comes out — moments, 
hours, days, in which we taste the rapture at once of 
poets and of saints. 

Lot was enjoying one of those blessed hours. 
He did not deserve it. But we none of us deserve 
the great things which God gives. The best we can 
hope for is that once they have come we shall be 
worthy of them. The hour when a man definitely 
breaks from some ignobleness in his life, when he 
has done with something, which, it may be, he wished 
a thousand times in secret he were done with — that 
is a mood of the soul which drags the Sun from its 
bed. I know of no experience which so immediately 
assures a man of God, as a victory of that kind in 
some long-contested battlefield. In such an hour you 
are beyond all discussion or argument. You know. 
You feel. At such a time you do not so much believe 
in God : you manifest God : He is with you. 
Reasons and arguments are of use only when we are 
not very sure, only when we are in difficulties, and 
are determined to hold on. In the hours when we 
really believe, we have no ear for proofs. We sing, 
we mount up with wings, we run and are not weary. 

Lot, I repeat, was having one of those hours. 
A hideous way of living had ceased to have any 
pleasure for him. He had never really liked the ways 
of Sodom. He had known Abraham and must have 
been conscious all the time that there was a higher 
i7 


2 


Our Ambiguous Life 

way. Still he had endured Sodom : nay, he had 
seemed to approve of it. He had struggled against 
it now and then, of course ; but still, he had always 
ended by succumbing. And so he had passed the 
days and months and years, divided, miserable ; 
aspiring, failing, slipping, sliding, slithering down 
the moral plane ; protesting always a little more 
faintly and helplessly, with no prospect before him 
but utter corruption and acquiescence at the end. 

And yet, praise God, here he is, out of it all, 
with no love for it, with indeed a horror of it which 
expressed itself in a clinging gratitude to God. 
It is no wonder that the Sun was risen upon the earth 
when Lot entered into Zoar. Even if the Sun had 
not come out, Lot could have dispensed with it, 
having such gaiety in his soul. 


Whatever hard things we may say about this 
life of ours, as we dwell upon its more sinister facts 
and aspects, it cannot be denied that life has already 
brought to many of us and offers to us all from time 
to time experiences which have this blessed power 
of bringing out the Sun. 

The recovery from illness is such an experience : 
so that it is almost worth while being ill in order to 
taste the pure and delicate joy of coming back to the 
world again. “ I think,’’ said a sweet child I know 
of, “ I think that next to being loved the best thing 
is being sick.” God took her at her word, and at 
18 


Sunrise 


seventeen she passed away in a chariot of light. 
How soft the breeze upon our cheek, how wonderful 
is everything — when, after a long ebbing of health, 
the tide has turned ! The end of a suspense is 
another such experience — as we know when one 
morning we awake, first with a heavy heart supposing 
that our burden is still upon us, only to remember 
next moment that it has gone. How the sun rises 
upon the earth ! 

The day when after a period of vacillation and 
indecision one sees his way, his task, the thing he 
must do to prove himself — is such a time. But 
indeed life, to those who feel it as it passes, is full 
of innumerable pauses and flashes of significance, 
times when something dawns upon us, as we say. 
Times, these, when some fear is lifted from our 
spirit, or when some unworthy glamour which has 
shamefully fascinated us assumes a wrinkled ugly 
face and leaves our true soul free ; times when, after 
a lonely struggle, Christ comes upon the scene 
and there is a great calm. 

Such moments pass indeed. Sometimes it is we 
who prove unworthy of them. Maybe it is God’s 
design that they should pass. But it is not His 
design that we should remain after they have visited 
us as we were before they came. 

Surely they come, those flashes of God’s own 
blessedness, in order that we may believe in Him 
from whom they must proceed. Surely they come 
so that when the clouds gather again or darkness 

19 


Our Ambiguous Life 

falls, we may never speak foolishly concerning God. 
Surely they come to us, those better hours, in order 
that we may believe in what we have seen and 
tasted there and then against the leer and insinu- 
ation of our more commonplace days. 

Not far from every place of human peril and 
failure, because not far from every human heart, 
there is by God’s appointment, in Christ Jesus, a 
place of refuge : and as we one by one, by faith, 
by seriousness, by prayer and entreaty and conse- 
cration, hasten from the one place to the other, 
there happens in the depth and solitude of our 
spirit, where alone we may be truly said to live, 
what happened here — the Sun comes out, and life 
stands justified. 


20 


Ill 


HOW THERE ARE PLACES IN WHICH THE 
ANGRY QUESTION IS NOT PUT 

A great part of this life of ours has one effect 
upon us, one result, namely, to raise questions in 
our minds. Starting from the happy and un- 
conscious faith of children, that everything in this 
world is exactly as it should be, the very intention 
of human experience would seem to be in various 
ways to put that faith upon its trial. Our main 
business and task as Christian people is to keep our 
hold on God, on Christ — to stand by the holy 
hypothesis right through our life ; not blindly 
indeed, but humble and wisely, by the help of a 
private fellowship with God. The one business of 
Christianity is to reconcile us to God and to keep us 
reconciled. 

Life for most people is a series of sharp and diffi- 
cult places separated from one another by what we 
might describe as easy going. It is probably never 
right to describe life in the case of the great mass of 
people as an unrelieved pressure or strain or trial. 
There are extraordinary compensations, reliefs, 
intervals of song, even in lives which seem to have 
21 


Our Ambiguous Life 

more than their share of troubles. No, what rather 
happens, and it happens to everyone, is this : we are 
going along in the usual way of our life when some- 
thing takes place. This something may be some- 
thing within ourselves, something that gives us a new 
way of looking at things, something that gives our 
entire life a new sensitiveness and wonder. Or 
the something that happens may be an event which 
touches us very closely : or it may be both an event in 
our circumstances and in the region of our feelings. 
In any case, it has the effect of making the whole 
of our life different. From that day things cannot 
remain with us as they were for indeed they ought 
not from that day to remain as they were. We 
must take up new ground. If the event, whatever 
it may have been, puts a new burden upon us, upon 
our faith in our fellow-men, or upon our faith in 
ourselves, or upon our faith in God’s government of 
the world, then we must either find a new and 
deeper faith, or we must acquiesce in a low and 
disheartened view of life and of everything. Some- 
thing of such a kind happens, I repeat, to us all 
one by one. In the journey of our life we come upon 
stiff bits of the road. It is not that we are always 
climbing or finding it hard. Still less is it that we are 
always clutching the side of a precipice with bleeding 
hands and a startled soul. No : it is rather that we 
are going on comfortably enough when something 
happens which gives to everything a turn of the 
screw, something of such a kind that in order to 


22 


The Angry Question 

recover our faith and happiness we must find some 
deeper or higher or holier way of looking at our- 
selves, and some solving reason as to why we are 
here in this world. 

Now it is at those sharp and precipitous places 
that we are acutely troubled, and in order to relieve 
ourselves we put our pathetic or angry questions to 
God. It is there — when something happens that 
makes life different and more mysterious for us — 
that we cry out in impatience or in submission. 
It is at such somewhat lonely places, more than 
in the ordinary days of our life, that we fashion our 
souls ; becoming better people than we once were 
or not so good. Driven by some event, or urged 
by the Spirit within us, we must change our footing ; 
we must go from one level to another. And that 
is a great moment when we must let go one hold on 
life as a whole in order that we may find another. 
For one moment we feel that terror of the abyss 
which lies at the back of all sincere questions and 
misgivings. But if after the dark moment we feel 
our feet upon some solid confidence, then we know 
God for ourselves and know Him for ever. 

The saint who wrote the twenty-seventh Psalm 
tells us that it was the poignancy of life which 
took him to church. He went “ to the temple,” 
he confesses, “ to enquire.” There is a great art 
in knowing where to face your difficulties. The 
answer you get to any real question depends almost 
entirely upon the place where you ask it. There 

23 


Our Ambiguous Life 

are certain questions about life which I could not 
answer out in the street ; an y answer I should come 
at would be a bitter answer. There are certain 
places in the world where I could not find any sane 
and stirring answer to life. But there are certain 
places where I think I can find an answer to the 
deepest and most disturbing question that life could 
put. And so he is a wise man who knows where to 
face his questions. He is a strong man who will 
refuse to take up some matter until he is in the 
midst of things that help him ; until in spirit he 
gets home. 

The great questions are wisely put only when our 
heads are bowed. 

In the seventy-third Psalm, which is a kind of 
synopsis of the Book of Job, you have the same idea. 
That seventy-third Psalm tells us the story of a 
man whose experience is a very common one in our 
day as it has been in all days. The man tells his 
own story. He very nearly gave up the whole busi- 
ness of life ; he very nearly took up a low view with 
regard to life. He himself had failed in some way : 
I do not know how. His life remained worried and 
anxious. He looked round about him in the world 
and saw how people who had not his sensitiveness 
seemed to be extraordinarily happy. Of course 
he had for the time being lost sight of the idea 
which was in our Lord’s mind when He said , 44 How 
much better is a man than a sheep ? ” He tells 
us how he looked about and saw bad people who 
24 


The Angry Question 

were getting on in the world. He describes, as 
only a very angry man could describe, how, “ their 
eyes stand out with fatness, they have more than 
heart could wish,” so that we can almost see them. 
“ They had no scruples : they were not troubled 
like other men.” As he thought and thought 
about these people he became angrier and angrier 
until he saw quite clearly that if he did not inter- 
rupt himself he would end by denying God. Where- 
upon, he tells us, he ran into a church ; and there his 
heart went soft. I have often tried to think what 
he saw there that made his heart grow soft when it 
was wild. At any rate, he tells us that as he sat 
there in a corner his heart began to grow soft within 
him. As he sat there it was not so much that his 
questions began to be answered ; it was rather that 
his questions became not so urgent, not so worth 
asking. He came out and took himself a long walk — 
a thing we far too seldom do. In that solitary walk 
he said some things to himself which nobody in the 
world would have dared to say to him. He said 
to himself : “ You very nearly made a mess of your 
life just now. You had allowed certain things to 
hang about your life so much that you were in danger 
really of denying God. You thought you were hav- 
ing intellectual difficulties about faith. The real 
fact of the matter was you were simply envious 
of the prosperity of the wicked. You had not the 
courage to be as bad as they were.” Whereupon 
he ends, “ Lord, I was as a beast before Thee.” 

25 


Our Ambiguous Life 

He had thought for the time being that the only 
enviable human lot was to become slack and com- 
fortable, free from all worries and cares. He had 
forgotten that with such a lot God sends leanness 
into the soul : in truth, He removes the soul, our 
Lord declared. 

We read in a Gospel that “ from that time the 
disciples durst not ask Him any question.” From 
what time ? You will find if you look up the 
passage that it was from the time when it dawned 
upon them that Jesus saw no other way through 
this world than that a man should lay down his life 
for his fellowmen. From that day they asked 
Him no more questions. 

God has answered nearly all our questions by 
sending Christ into the world, who died for us ; 
and He has answered them in this sense that face to 
face with Christ we do not feel disposed to ask any 
question — at least with the view of letting our- 
selves off. 

When I survey the wondrous cross 
On which the Prince of Glory died, 

I am ashamed of having even proposed to ask God 
any bitter question, any question which has its 
source in my own pride, or in my vanity, or even in 
my sufferings. 


26 


IV 


PROVERBS AND A PROVERB 

Proverbs represent the hard-won wisdom of the 
human race. And so, it is always at our peril that 
we flout any wise saying which has come to us from 
remote times. For it was always a serious thing 
to live. In this uprooted time of ours, when the 
human race is on its feet watching for something 
— it knows not what — we are aware, as our fathers 
had no need to be aware, how very serious a thing 
life is, and what delicate arrangements are needed to 
evade disasters. 

All primitive peoples are rich in proverbs. Small 
nations or nations which had a rather grim and 
precarious experience, contending year by year 
with a poor soil and a sour climate, were always 
peculiarly rich in proverbs. For proverbs are the 
result of thinking, and the tendency to think is apt 
to become strong in people who are having a hard 
time. Rich, opulent peoples, to whom things 
come easily, are for the most part without proverbs. 
They did not need that nimbleness and patience of 
the spirit which are the breath of this particular 
kind of wisdom. Proverbs flourished in a small 
country like Scotland, and in a small country like 
27 


Our Ambiguous Life 

Palestine ; and again they flourished in an immense 
country like Russia — in each case because for one 
reason or another life in these countries was pre- 
carious and circumstances on the whole were 
threatening. And so it comes to pass that whenever 
as at this hour life in general seems once again to 
be becoming difficult and even dangerous, we are 
in the mood to listen to any wise old observation, 
and not to think the less of it because it has come 
from far-off days when people had not indeed 
our wonderful civilization but when it would seem 
they had time to think about life and about things 
beneath the surface. 

There is a note in most of those old proverbs 
which is apt to offend us in these days. It is what 
you might call their leisureliness. They will not 
promise you anything while you wait, or even next 
day. They make much of the influence of time. 
Perhaps they err on the side of caution : but even 
if that be so they are of value for an age which is 
nervous and in an hurry. Certainly they will hold 
out no promise of a swift return for any pains you 
take. They will assure you indeed that what you 
honestly put into life you will get out of it and 
perhaps with interest. But the transaction takes 
time. Anything that comes easily, goes easily ; 
and a really good thing is worth working for and 
waiting for. The fact is, proverbs belong to the 
stone age ; whereas we were born into the age of 
steam and electricity. The consequence is we are 
28 


Proverbs and a Proverb 

apt to be impatient of the slowness of proverbs. 
They always seem to be walking on foot ; whereas 
we think walking on foot a waste of time. And so 
it might seem that this old wisdom has no value 
for people like ourselves ; we live in a different 
world. 

Now that is quite true : that , however, and no 
more. And that by itself is not everything. What 
do I mean ? I mean this. We live in a different 
world, and yet we ourselves are the same. There 
is not one single liability under which human nature 
once upon a time suffered, from which in these days 
of ours it is entirely free. There is no single weakness 
or excess of human nature which we have now finally 
mastered. There is no sin which was wont to affect 
man in more primitive conditions concerning 
which we can now say, “ Thank God, that at least is 
past and done with ! ” It is a dictum in biology 
that “ acquired characteristics are not transmitted.” 
A very blessed law it is, promising as it does that the 
very sins of the fathers need not fall upon their 
children to unborn generations : that no one is 
necessarily cursed at his birth. That, I say, is a 
most blessed law, and in harmony with the character 
of God — for it means that no one need despair. 
But the law that “ acquired characteristics are not 
transmitted ” is a very grave ordinance of God : 
for it means that the moral victories of one 
generation are not inherited by the succeeding 
generation. Every generation in personal matters 
29 


Our Ambiguous Life 

begins at the beginning and has to come by its 
own resources. “ Acquired characteristics are not 
transmitted ” : therefore let no one despair. 
“ Acquired characteristics are not transmitted ” : 
therefore let no one presume. 

Anything that was ever true of man, is still true. 
Any danger which once upon a time beset him, 
besets him still. This danger may take a new form 
and may approach us from a new covert ; it may also 
have different consequences. But beneath the 
surface it is the same. This is true of bright and 
reassuring things ; and it is true of things that are 
sinister. We can read an old story from the Bible, 
let us say, or from Homer — a story embodying some 
poignant human emotion — the story of Joseph 
making himself known to his brethren, in Genesis ; 
or the story of the parting of Hector and 
Andromache, in the Iliad. And, although long 
centuries of time separate us and deep gulfs of change 
intervene, as we read, behold time and space fall 
away, and we shed tears as though it were the very 
hour and we near by when Judah is interceding for 
his young brother, and Joseph can no longer restrain 
himself. Man is the child of God in this, that like 
his Father he is the same yesterday and to-day and 
for ever. 

It is because this is so that the literature of the 
soul never loses its fitness. What was true in the 
sense of what was sincerely felt to be necessary 
for those who went before us, will be found to be true 
30 


Proverbs and a Proverb 

and necessary for ourselves to-day. We may allow 
ourselves to be deceived by the glitter and large- 
ness of our present-day life and dismiss whatever 
appeal the ancient wisdom of the race might have 
for us. But in that case we shall learn of our mistake, 
or those who come after us will learn. In this wide 
world consequences may take a long time to declare 
themselves ; but one day the bill comes due and the 
debt has to be paid. 

And now let us look for a moment at one of those 
old-fashioned sayings which we may believe has 
behind its wrinkled countenance a whole world of 
experience. “ Train up a child in the way he 
should go and when he is old he will not depart from 
it.” The words are spoken of course in the first 
instance to parents. There can be no doubt that it 
is God’s arrangement for the human race that parents 
should teach their children. I can believe that there 
is something which children can get only from 
those who begat them ; something of such a kind 
that if children do not get it from their parents, 
they never get it : they have to live and they have 
to die without it. 

Now there is no creature of God, I can believe, 
down to the very level of the jelly-fish, which does 
not acknowledge this responsibility. I have seen a 
hen step out in front of her large family of helpless 
birds and stand ready to defend them against a 
great brute of a dog. She might have run away 
leaving her silly brood to scuttle and take their 
3i 


Our Ambiguous Life 

chance. But no, there she stands, with a heroism 
which makes the strutting of armed knights in days 
of chivalry a rather ridiculous thing. She can do 
no other. It is the law of her being, the ordi- 
nance of God written in her members, that she shall 
give her life, if need be, that her offspring may be 
spared. And more than that and in its way quite 
as fine as that, I have seen, and we have all seen, a hen 
taking her brood about, first for a little distance, 
then for a distance slightly greater, to teach them to 
look for food ; showing them what their food is, 
taking into her own beak a crumb, a seed of corn, 
and dropping it to the ground with a gurgling, 
chatty sound as though she was saying, “ That was 
a nice bit indeed and I should have liked to keep 
it for myself, if it were not that I had such a crowd 
of you troublesome darlings to cater for.” 

Our blessed Lord who in His short life seems to 
have seen everything that is beautiful in this world, 
must have noticed the fidelity of a hen. He 
likened His own love, His own willingness to care 
for us and to shelter us, He likened it to the bravery 
and recklessness of a hen. And at the last He 
interposed His own precious body to ward off from 
the human race some fell enemy ; even as a hen 
in the agony of her motherhood flings herself in the 
way of danger for her brood’s sake — obeying some 
divine impulse in her puzzled little brain. 


32 


Proverbs and a Proverb 

Yes : you may search nature from the lowliest 
creature to the highest and you look in vain for any 
godless lapse in the mighty bond of love and care- 
fulness which links the generations. There is no 
species in which the parents do not equip their 
offspring for their peculiar tasks in life, warning them 
of the dangers and acquainting them with the 
appropriate strategy by which to ward off disease 
and to keep back death until death is due. 

It is only when we come to man that the repudi- 
ation of nature becomes possible. For man alone 
of all God’s creatures can use his reason as his accom- 
plice rather than his guide. Man alone can use his 
intelligence to frustrate his instincts, and can work 
up into activity certain poorer and later desires 
that take the very life-blood from his deep and 
fundamental pieties. 

I do not, of course, wish to claim as our duty 
anything impossible and absurd. But there is 
no need for one to say that. A man’s conscience is 
not touched or troubled by any charge which at the 
moment he can feel to be impossible or absurd. 
We are touched and troubled only when something 
is brought home to us which we have to confess 
is within our power and well within our power. 
The difficulty in these more complicated days of 
carrying out this deep and penetrating responsi- 
bility is no greater than the difficulty of obeying any 
other high call. It is merely one of those difficulties 
which make up life. That a thing is difficult is no 
33 


Our Ambiguous Life 

reason why we should abandon it. That a thing 
is difficult ought only to mean that we shall set 
ourselves and lay plans and take precautions lest we 
fail. For it is one way of saying “ I believe in God,” 
to say, I believe that for one who is sincere and 
faithful and not afraid of the cost, a thing is possible 
which is right. The fact is, there must be something 
applicable to mankind in an ordinance of God which 
rules throughout all nature, so that the repudiation 
of this pervading and mysterious law soon or late 
must make for corruption and the breaking up 
of the Catholic idea of man. 

But though the proverb is addressed in the first 
instance to those who have children of their own, it 
need not be confined to these. There is a deep 
saying of Holy Scripture, that no word of God 
is of private interpretation ; which I take to mean 
that any word of God which applies to one class 
of people applies in spirit to all people at all times 
and everywhere. We should all see to it that in 
spirit we have children of our own. 

It is not the modern Church of Rome only, it was 
the undivided Christian Church to which we all 
belong, that was ready to receive vows of conse- 
crated chastity and consecrated virginity. It was 
her way of asking all, and especially such as were 
without children of their own, to assume a share of 
the general responsibility. And so the unwedded, 
and the childless, were encouraged to believe that 
as all children belong to God, as Christ in symbol 
34 


Proverbs and a Proverb 

and in truth had taken all children upon His heart, 
it was given to them also to seek out and to fulfil 
some portion of the great task. 

For if it is possible for the human mind to sink 
lower than the dumb creatures in some horrid repu- 
diation of natural functions, it is possible also for the 
human mind to rise higher than any merely natural 
affection. Perhaps the tenderest mothers of the race 
have been those who never bore a child. Perhaps 
the minds that have laboured most thoughtfully for 
the health and safeguarding of the weak, who have 
given themselves with the utmost detachment and 
persistence to some saving or alleviating ministry, 
have been those that took their task not from nature 
but from God. Indeed, wherever this grace is 
found in man or woman, enabling them to bear 
burdens not their own, and to assume responsi- 
bilities that were not imposed by a physical decree, 
there is apt to appear in the face or voice or general 
manner, a sweetness and beauty which suggest to 
others something of the holiness of Jesus. A life 
which has permitted us to see such things, cannot 
in the end be in vain. 


35 


V 


NATURE AND NURTURE 

We have dealt with the truth or principle underlying 
the saying “ Train up a child in the way he should 
go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” 
That truth or principle is that God has so ordered 
things that one generation comes from the loins of 
another, and that the generation which is coming 
into the world has only such resources as it derives 
from all the generations that have preceded, repre- 
sented by the generation that immediately precedes. 
We saw that this is a law which operates through- 
out nature from the humblest forms of life to the 
most highly organized : the parent recognizes 
responsibility for its offspring. On every level of 
life parents provide their young with the wisdom and 
strategy which are essential for their particular 
experience, so that they may take advantage of their 
circumstances and be on guard against their peculiar 
dangers. And so it becomes clear that if man 
should ever propose to repudiate this law of his being, 
he would sink to a level lower than that of God’s 
other creatures. 

We must believe that in the long run nations 
or races which keep alive this natural piety will 
outlive races and nations that have trifled with it or 
36 


Nature and Nurture 


have abandoned it. This was a point of view which 
became clear in the controversies which were waged 
in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century. The 
first effect of Darwin’s Origin of Species was to give 
the impression of the natural world as simply a field 
of blood, that “ nature ” was “ red in tooth and 
claw with ravin.” And that if men were to act 
according to merely natural law, there was no 
prospect for the human race except one of ever- 
lasting strife. 

But this merely brutal view of nature was some- 
what mitigated and is mitigated when we dwell 
upon another principle which is equally present in 
the natural world, namely the principle which leads 
the humblest creature to defend her offspring 
though it be at the cost of her own life. For it 
became apparent that the forms and species which 
subsisted and survived were those which had the 
power of acting together, which were able, that is 
to say, to restrain their merely animal pugnacity 
for the sake of some common interest ; also that face 
to face with the hostility of nature, those forms and 
species had the better chance which were not sent 
out ignorant and unprotected into their particular 
life, but were fortified by the wisdom of their 
ancestors. 

We had reached this point in an earlier study. 
And now to proceed. 

One of the greatest changes that have taken place 
in the world of ideas during my own time, has been 
37 


Our Ambiguous Life 

to reduce to some extent the absolute dominance 
of hereditary influences and to make clear the quite 
enormous importance of training and education and 
environment. Many diseases which, thirty years 
ago, were supposed to be inherited, it is now believed 
are not strictly so ; that at the worst only 
the disposition is inherited, the liability ; that it is 
the evil environment which fertilizes and makes 
effective something which in fairer circumstances 
might have lain asleep, and might have died in its 
sleep. Whatever be the truth of the relative 
importance of heredity and environment, certainly 
it is our part to make the most we can of the in- 
fluence of circumstances and conditions. For these 
are largely in our own hands ; and it is a terrible 
responsibility, to reflect, that by maintaining certain 
evil conditions both of the body and of the mind, we 
may be perpetuating a whole world of evil which, 
but for our indolence, would cease to be. Certainly 
we are beginning to see rather more clearly than 
was possible a generation ago, that human nature 
is not something fixed and settled, necessarily the 
same in every age. That, on the contrary, human 
nature is plastic, amenable to suggestion, so that 
certain faculties and aptitudes may be encouraged 
and certain others resisted and depressed. Take 
an illustration ; and I recall it with no desire 
indeed to revive the bitterness of recent years. 

We have it on the authority of Ford Madox 
Hueffer that for almost an entire generation previous 
38 


Nature and Nurture 


to the outbreak of the war, little children in Germany 
under the compulsion of the Prussian Educational 
System, were trained to sing in unison : they were 
not permitted to sing in harmony. What was the 
idea of that ? Oh, an excellent idea from the point 
of view of a government which was preparing for 
a final trial of its power. To sing in harmony each 
one must consider the other. I must not allow my 
voice to drown yours. I must hold myself in, 
in the interests of balance ; for balance rather than 
force or volume is the object aimed at in harmony. 
And more than that, to sing a part in a larger 
harmony requires more courage, and therefore one 
is apt to be timid who attempts it. One who sings 
a part must find all his resources within himself. 
He gets no assistance from the others except indeed 
those delicate reactions and contrasts which a fine 
ear perceives and obeys. In unison everything is 
otherwise. I need not have much of a voice, and 
what I have need not be of any fine quality. I am 
now one of a mob, and in a mob there are sure to be 
many fine singers. And so I can put back my head 
and let myself go ; and if I am young, if I am a 
child, that is what I shall do. Even if I am a little 
out of tune, no one will know, the general will will 
cover up my weakness. In fact, 

“ Mine not to reason why. 

Mine but to do or die.” 

The Prussian Educational Department recom- 
mended and enforced this regulation concerning 
39 


Our Ambiguous Life 

“ singing in unison,” on the ground that this 
practice had the effect upon young minds of giving 
the feeling of Macht — of power. By this means, in 
short, it was proposed to rear an entire generation 
to pay no heed to certain personal scruples ; but to 
take its cue from the general mind, so that, if the 
general mind should ever be inflamed over some 
alleged danger or insult — and in these days a few 
scoundrels with great resources behind them could 
easily inflame the general mind — that generation, 
disciplined from its childhood to sing together and 
to take courage from each other’s very physical 
nearness, might march in a kind of intoxication to 
victory or death. And indeed they were not 
wrong in their forecast. When war broke out, that 
whole nation marched westwards, pouring in massed 
battalions, regiments, divisions, army corps, through 
Belgium and Flanders and France, until, as it seemed 
to us at the moment and as it still seems to us to-day 
looking back, they met God on the Marne. 

Ah, but how dreadful, you say, to take the young 
and tender human soul and train it to take part in 
such enormities ! Dreadful indeed, but not un- 
intelligent. The dreadfulness was in the aim and 
motive which lay behind the practice : the vice was 
in the W eltanschauung — in the view of the meaning 
of life which inspired such an insight and such 
industry. It was but another illustration of the fell 
power which those Teutons have of capturing an 
idea and turning it to advantage. The idea was an 
40 


Nature and Nurture 


absolutely sound one ; and we suffer on all hands, in 
every country under heaven to-day from the 
neglect of it. What is the idea ? It is that the 
human soul is not a definite thing which in all 
circumstances remains what it was, and will always 
and in all circumstances behave in a particular way 
which we somehow suppose is natural and in- 
evitable. The human soul is something which — 
certainly to an extent to which at this moment we 
can place no limit — can be moulded, fashioned ; 
converted, diverted, perverted ; made, unmade ; 
heightened, lowered ; encouraged, depressed ; 
stung into fineness by the sense of shame in the 
presence of something fine, or confirmed in some 
baseness or debauchery by the surrounding and 
applause of wicked people, especially if these wicked 
ones are older in years. 

Knowing what was before her, and how a day 
might come when the Fatherland would need every 
man and woman to pass through years of horrors, 
Germany, according to the circumstance which 
Ford Madox Hueffer selects and according to the 
context which he provides, trained her people 
industriously, painfully, systematically, so to respond 
to an appointed cry that, when the cry was 
given, she might spring to her feet, ready to endure 
without flinching such hardships as might come to 
her, and to bear without the weakness of a pitying 
tear such horrors as she might herself impose upon 
all who withstood her on the way. 


Our Ambiguous Life 

Up to a point, she was right in her method, in her 
insight ; she was wrong in the dark and fell use 
for which she was ready to manipulate the soul of 
a generation. 

Now it will not have been worth my while to 
have recalled such things if the only effect of them is 
to make us say, “ Ah, well, thank God I should 
never have thought of such a thing,” and so settle 
back into doing nothing, with the old wrong idea 
that if we leave things to themselves they will 
somehow come right. What I am urging is, that 
the human soul is like a sensitized plate, ready to 
take on — anything ; ready to become everything 
that it sees. In fact, the human soul, yours, mine, 
every one’s, is simply the sum of all that we have ever 
seen and heard and done. And I have said that the 
most unmistakable and unanimous voice of God 
throughout nature, from the insect to erected man, 
is that one generation shall accompany the generation 
which follows it out upon its tragic but glorious path. 
We of this generation are to speak to the generation 
which shall follow us, disclosing our own wisdom 
and our experience, confessing where we failed and 
went astray, and not ashamed to name the very 
matters on which if life were to be renewed to us 
we should act differently. And all this especially 
towards those who are still in the tender and 
formative years, before the wind from a larger and, 
as it might appear, an irrelevant context has had 
time to wither certain tender shoots. For there are 


42 


Nature and Nurture 


things which once planted in the soul and defended 
for a very few years, can later meet the world with- 
out withering or breaking. If in later days such 
fine growths of the early years should fail, it will not 
have been solely as the result of any external pressure. 
It will have been with the consent, that is to say 
with the guilt, of the soul which let them wither. 
It will not be so much that those fine things have 
died ; it will be that they have been killed, strangled, 
starved to death by one who was old enough to know 
what he was doing, or to know that by his negligence 
and indolence and disregard of life’s finer warnings he 
was permitting something precious of which he had 
been put in charge to drown in a sea of forgetfulness. 

Herodotus has a quaint story of a debate as to 
what was the original language of the human race. 
A plan for settling this question beyond further 
debate was agreed upon, all parties promising to 
accept the findings. A newly-born babe was put 
under the care of some people who could neither 
hear nor speak, so that the child heard nothing. 
The years which had been agreed upon went by. 
The Committee (as we should call it) appeared, to 
examine the child; to listen to the first word it 
should utter ; for the language to which such a 
word belonged was to be held as man’s primitive and 
proper speech. The Committee reported that this 
child, left to itself, uncorrupted indeed, but also 
unillumined and unguided by any human inter- 
course, even by the fond foolishness of a loving 
43 


Our Ambiguous Life 

mother, had said something which sounded like 
“ Baa.” Probably the poor lonely creature had 
heard far away the bleating of a lamb or a young 
goat ! That was all it had ever heard of a mother 
or of God. 

The fact is, I doubt very much whether it is 
possible for one to believe in a loving God with all 
the warmth which such a faith can radiate, who has 
not as an infant and child already met and known 
God in the form of some living human being with 
arms and a breast. 

Let us have these things in our minds a little more 
steadily and acutely. Especially let us have them 
in our minds when we recall certain words of Jesus 
which seem to suggest that He had them in His 
mind. “ Whosoever offendeth one of these little 
ones who believe in Me,” said Jesus, “ it were better 
for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck 
and that he were drowned in the depths of the sea.” 

And let us not take credit to ourselves that at 
least we have never actively taught evil or recom- 
mended the low view of life. For according to 
certain almost unusually deliberate words of Jesus, 
it is a greater sin not to have done certain things 
than to have done certain other things. And we 
can see how that may well be so. If we were 
actively to teach evil to the next generation it would 
mean at least that we believed that life meant 
something, though it might be something very 
foolish or very wrong. But when we teach the next 
44 


Nature and Nurture 


generation nothing , when we let them find their 
way, to make what they can of the noises of this 
contending world, they themselves having from our 
loins certain aptitudes and dangers of the blood and 
of the brain, when we teach them nothing, when we 
say nothing to them about life’s deeper bearings 
and its remoter and final significance, and of the only 
wisdom which can endure the challenge of life and 
death and a judgment to come, when we leave them 
to feel their way, listening, like that pathetic creature 
of Herodotus’ tale, to the bleatings of a goat, for 
some light upon the problem of existence — why it 
all means that in our own view life has no meaning 
which is worth communicating. 

It was but rarely that our Lord lifted the veil 
from what lies beyond us and comes after death. 
And therefore what words He spake concerning such 
mysteries should be the more treasured by us all. 
And this He did say : that in the end of the days and 
in the presence of God we are all of us likely to be 
troubled at the discovery, not so much of what we 
did when we were here on earth, as by the discovery 
of what we did not do. 

And there is another saying of Jesus which fits 
precisely all that has gone before. “ Do men gather 
grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles ? ” And if we 
reply, “ But Lord, we have not sown thorns or 
thistles ” ; He may ask, “ What then have ye 
sown ? ” And if we answer even with a little shame 
and trepidation, “ Alas, Lord, we sowed nothing — 
45 


Our Ambiguous Life 

nothing in the hearts of our children, nothing in the 
mind and conscience of the generation to which 
we knew we should have to hand over this world,” 
He may with justice say to us, “ In this world of 
actual living things, he who sows nothing has sown 
tares.” 


46 


VI 


THE RELIEF OF ACTION 

Looking back over our life who are old enough to 
make it worth while, we shall see that trouble has 
come to us from one or other of three different 
sources. We may be troubled about ourselves ; 
or we may be troubled about other people, our 
friends, our neighbours, our contemporaries, the 
world ; or we may be troubled about God — about 
life either on the large scale, or as it has smitten 
ourselves in some poignant event. If we look 
firmly into these three causes in turn, we shall agree 
that another way of saying the same thing and of 
describing those three sources of private misery 
is to say — that when we are troubled, it is either 
about our sins, or about our misfortunes, or about 
the fact of death. 

Certainly any one of these three may assume 
such an aspect for us as to paralyze our true life, 
bringing over us a kind of sickness like bodily sickness 
in which we come to a stand-still. Until this 
trouble of ours is composed and honourably com- 
posed, we are not free, we are not human, we are not 
in possession of ourselves : we are depressed and 
made impotent by shame or anger or fear. I make 
47 


Our Ambiguous Life 

a difference there between two ways in which any 
private misery may be met. We may deal honour- 
ably with it or we may deal dishonourably. We 
deal dishonourably with our trouble when we try 
to make light of it to ourselves. When we deny 
that it is there or that it ought to be there, or 
when being there we determine not to think about 
it, and plunge into some kind of folly or self-in- 
dulgence in order to save us from the pressure of 
it — that is, I hold, to be dealing dishonourably with 
the soul. By such methods we may succeed in taking 
our mind away from some insistent thing, but we 
have done nothing so far to the solution of it. On 
the contrary, we have taught ourselves a very bad 
lesson : we have trained and disposed ourselves not 
to stand up to our trouble but to run away from it. 
Unless we take care, we shall accustom ourselves to 
a cowardly attitude towards life ; until what really 
shall have happened within us is that we have lost 
all hardihood and endurance and have handed over 
our spirit to the very lowest human instinct, the 
instinct to escape at the cost of our honour from mere 
pain. 

This perhaps is the most disastrous use to which we 
can put a habit or practice which in itself may be 
entirely innocent — we may rush to it in order to 
drown care, as one might take strong drink in order 
to give him false courage or to blunt the edge of 
his own thoughts. 

But that is the broad road to perdition. 


The Relief of Action 


No : ultimately a man must find his resources in 
his own reason and in God. In other words, he 
must confront his soul with the facts, and from the 
facts make his appeal to that God who is always with 
us the moment we are done with make-believes 
and are ready to face realities. It is never wise to 
accept external assistance in the solution of a diffi- 
culty which is altogether our own. We commit 
ourselves by such courses to a habit of moral in- 
feriority and shrinking ; since we cannot for ever 
elude reality, we are laying up for ourselves a day 
of utter confusion or imbecility. 

The first step towards deliverance from fear 
within us is to face the facts ; for only then may we 
believe, and then assuredly we do believe, that 
the very Heart of this whole universe is beating 
rhythmically with our heart. 

We are all of us aware how greatly it helps us in 
a day when something is lying heavily upon our 
spirit, simply to do something, to act. In the day 
of his trouble a man does not want “ light ” but a 
motive: he wants not an explanation and analysis 
of the situation but the impelling force, the creative 
energy which will draw him on to do something. 
He wants a motive. 

It is a deep instinct with the experience doubtless 
of all time behind it, which prompts us to get up 
from our dejection or gloom to seek deliverance in 
personal action. 

But what I have been trying to say is that there is 

49 


Our Ambiguous Life 

a noble use of this instinct and an ignoble. Every- 
thing depends upon our intention. The instinct 
itself is right and guides us to the final truth on this 
whole matter. The soul is saved always by a kind 
of action. That action may be, as indeed I believe 
it is, the delicate pressure of God upon our mind; 
and so first and last we are delivered from all our 
troubles by God as often as we are indeed delivered. 
But we become aware of this in ourselves as an 
instinct to act, to arise, to do something. Now, so 
far we are right. So far it is God. But all the rest 
is our own : and therefore in all the rest we may 
err and do err. 

If in my trouble I do something, but simply with 
the view of enabling me for a little while to forget 
my trouble, I have in fact not done myself any good, 
but rather harm. I am like one who puts off an 
interview, it may be an interview with myself, 
which nevertheless I cannot escape. Or, like one 
who, thinking about his debts, suddenly breaks off 
and goes away on a holiday as though things will be 
different when he comes back. In such a case a man 
has abused and misunderstood the instinct of the 
soul — to escape from trouble in personal action. 

What that instinct ought to mean for us is that, 
when beset by any trouble, we must not lie passive 
under it, for that is the sin of despair which is 
perhaps the only sin. We must act, that is, we must 
believe in life rather than in what threatens and 
embarrasses our life : we must believe in Spirit, 
5o 


The Relief of Action 


in Personality, in God, in a final Resource which can 
come for ever between us and the devastating power 
of things or thoughts. In short, the first action to 
which the soul is called in the day of trouble is to 
believe. Faith is action, hope is action, love is 
action. In each it is the human soul resting now 
upon its own spiritual Resource, acting for its own 
reasons in the midst of a world of conflict and 
contradiction. 

It is action of this kind, action with the motive 
and intention of faith, of communion with God, 
that alone will honourably heal a soul which life 
has wounded, or reinforce a soul which life by some 
harsh event has for the moment darkened. 

We have the proverb Solvitur ambulando , which 
means that light comes not as we sit down waiting 
for it, eating out our hearts. Light comes as we 
proceed. Applied to the formidable things of this 
life of ours — our own moral failures, the misfor- 
tunes which befall us, and the certainty of death — 
applied to these great things which, if we had no 
word from God concerning them, would indeed 
overshadow us and bring the finer souls to a stand- 
still through sorrow — applied to such things the 
proverb cannot possibly mean that life is solved 
by our going on anyhow and not thinking much about 
it. That is not true, and it would be cynical to 
say such a thing. It would be like advising a man 
who is in financial difficulties to “ take things easy ” 
and everything will come right. But things are not 
5i 


Our Ambiguous Life 

solved by letting them drift ; least of all the affairs 
of the soul. No : the truth of the proverb “ that 
a thing is solved by proceeding/’ applied to the 
deeper questions of life, is surely this : 

That the darkness of things is always accompanied 
by and may even have its source in a stagnation and 
silence of the soul, and that the darkness of things 
will remain until our souls receive energy from a 
region beyond things, that is, from God. 

Thereafter, having endured the aspect of reality 
— as it comes home to us, say in our sins, or in our 
sufferings, or in the sense of this passing world — 
having endured the aspect of reality and having 
found God afresh, let us proceed to live in the 
practice of God’s Presence day by day, doing with 
fidelity and simplicity what we have to do, dealing 
honourably with our own souls ; Let us not become 
selfish and absorbed in our own problem. Let us 
rather allow our problem to keep our hearts soft 
and tender towards all lives knowing that they also 
have their sore and their grief. Let us dwell much 
in the atmosphere of Christ’s thoughts and words 
concerning God and life and all things. 

And it is promised not that all things will become 
clear or that those whom life has maimed will cease 
to halt a little or cease to lean upon a staff ; but it 
is promised that, living day by day as seeing God 
who is invisible, we shall see Him more and more, 
and seeing Him all bitterness will pass. For we are 
here not in the first instance to see our way or to have 
52 


The Relief of Action 


our way. We are here to do our duty. We are here 
to become better than we are. We are here to 
become good men and women : and it is just as we 
become good men and women that life becomes a 
more and more simple thing, in which there is but 
one thing needful — to be sure of God. 


35 


VII 


REVIVAL— THE ONE THING ASSURED 

There is nothing more natural to Christian people 
who understand their own faith than to expect 
God from time to time to come upon the scene. 
Wherever we Christians got the idea of God as a 
great Being who gave this earth of ours its original 
spin and then left it to exhaust that first impulse 
and to die down, it was never in the documents of 
our faith or in the experience of the saints. The 
very characteristic of our God is that He is always 
interfering. Rather, we should say, He has so taken 
up His abode with us, that any human arrangements 
which we may make either for ourselves as individuals 
or for nations and peoples — arrangements which 
leave Him outside and unregarded — are arrange- 
ments which one day break down. Of course He 
has given us a measure of freedom, so that to a certain 
extent He has put a limit upon His own power. 
But whatever we may say about this freedom of 
ours, and from certain points of view it might seem 
to be a pure delusion, it is of such a kind and we 
human beings are such, that a day comes when we 
begin to feel that we have perhaps as much freedom 
— I mean freedom on final matters, on matters of 
54 


Revival — The One Thing Assured 

life and death — as we want. Certainly times come, 
and this with such inevitableness and regularity 
that they would seem to obey some harmonic law, 
when we are more than a little timid and even afraid 
of our freedom, and we are ready to fall back upon 
something deeper, nearer to the sources of our true 
life as it seems to us. At such times the wise ones 
of the world — who, however, are really the abnormal 
and slightly inhuman ones — are shocked at what they 
declare is reaction and superstition, a miserable 
apostasy from the high calling of reason. But the 
others persist though they are reckoned fools ; and 
history vindicates them. Looking back, we see that 
in falling inwards upon God and upon themselves, 
they were defending something which in the long 
run is of more consequence to man than wisdom. 
They were defending that supernatural core, that 
final affinity with a Holy Will, that unquenchable 
protest against mere natural law in the realm of the 
spirit, which is of man’s very essence. 

Certain it is, explain it as men will, that from 
time to time in the course of history some portion 
of the human race has been caught up in a wave of 
unworldly emotion. The wave has lifted that 
portion of the human race above itself, and has made 
certain things possible which previously had not 
even been dreamed of. And even if in later days 
that portion of the race fell away from its greatness, 
and the flood of unworldly emotion seemed to sink 
again, nevertheless something had been achieved ; 

55 


Our Ambiguous Life 

a standard, a gleam, an afterthought, a lofty and 
rebuking reminiscence had been felt in the secret 
chambers of men’s hearts. 

A phenomenon of this kind will of course have 
its various interpretations. In our interpretations 
we really pass judgment upon ourselves. What you 
say about life, or about any outstanding episode 
in life, may not cast very much light upon life or 
upon that episode, but it does cast a great deal of 
light upon you. If you put a base or low inter- 
pretation upon a thing which at any rate is con- 
ceivably capable of a higher interpretation, you 
simply announce that you are that kind of person. 
You are, that is to say, the kind of person who, on a 
matter on which a high significance can be placed 
and a low significance can be placed, are disposed to 
put the low significance. 

Nietzsche, for example, whom we all belaboured 
so heartily during the war, had his quite shrewd ex- 
planation of these great outbursts. His theory was 
that there are two well-defined forces which, now the 
one and now the other, agitate and control the life 
of man. He calls the one the Dionysian impulse 
and the other the Apollonian. The Dionysian 
impulse was that which expressed itself in music, 
in dancing, in ecstasy. It is the kind of raw material 
which, under the blows and discipline of experience, 
harnesses itself in with laws and manners and religions. 
The Apollonian mood descends upon man perhaps 
as a result of natural fatigue, perhaps — and this 
56 


Revival — The One Thing Assured 

was Nietzsche’s explanation — as the result of the 
interested machinations of the timid and the 
thoughtful and the cowardly. But in any case even 
he had to admit that there is first that which is 
natural and afterwards that which is spiritual ; that 
after the intoxication there is the headache ; after 
the frenzy the fear, when “ the native hue of reso- 
lution ” becomes “ sicklied o’er with the pale cast 
of thought ; and enterprises of great pith and 
moment with this regard their currents turn awry 
and lose the name of action.” 

But we need not accept Nietzsche’s account of 
these things, even while we do agree that there are 
these two well-defined moods which, it may be 
necessarily, descend upon the human soul. There 
is a mood of warmth and daring and enterprise, 
a mood of action and fertility and singing ; and 
following upon that, perhaps as the result of the mis- 
management of all that, there comes another mood 
of caution and misgiving and fear, of revenge and 
indignation against ourselves, and of shame even for 
our too great exuberance. There are times when the 
human race is on the march ; and there are times 
when it is in winter quarters, or in tents, or behind 
walls and entrenchments — or any other metaphor 
which describes an army on the defensive or 
at rest. 

Our blessed Lord had all this, we may believe, 
in His view. Certainly, according to the Fourth 
Gospel, though not in that Gospel alone, the idea 
57 


Our Ambiguous Life 

was quite definitely before Him. In the conver- 
sation with Nicodemus, you will recall our Lord’s 
words. “ The wind bloweth where it listeth. 
Thou hearest the sound of it but canst not tell 
whence it cometh or whither it goeth : so is every- 
one that is born of God.” Still earlier than that He 
had said to Nicodemus, “ Ye must be born again.” 
These words, alike in themselves and in the context 
which Jesus gave them, carry with them this very 
meaning, that there is a sense in which nothing great 
happens until it is due, until it comes from God. 
Not that we are without responsibility for the thing 
happening or not happening. We have our duty of 
preparation and faith and entreaty ; our obligation 
to hold ourselves at the angle of expectancy. But 
still, when all is said, nothing happens until God 
floods our heart. But it is part of our Lord’s 
teaching also that in a sense the thing never happens 
unless within strained and sensitive souls. “ Ask 
and ye shall receive ; seek and ye shall find ; knock 
and the door shall be opened unto you.” The words 
mean that nothing will happen from the side of God 
unless at the entreaty of souls. But the words mean 
also that given this entreaty of souls the fidelity 
of God will not fail. 

To return, however, to what really is my one 
business in all this. There is nothing more demon- 
strably true of man than that from time to time he 
has derived an accession of power, the effect of which 
has been to give him a new range of moral possibility. 

58 


Revival— -The One Thing Assured 

Again and again his moral batteries become re- 
charged, his whole being revitalized so that an 
entire way of looking at life which had seemed the 
only possible way — sad, difficult, pathetic — 
suddenly, when the heart is in flood with God, 
becomes inadequate and inept and ridiculous. 
When you have been chanting a kind of elegy over 
life as though death and failure were its true and 
final marks, suddenly the sick man has risen from his 
couch and calls for some robuster music, music by 
which he and you and others may march with spirit 
against an enemy. 

Perhaps we could state the law of this whole 
matter, we who believe in God, and say that when 
it dawns upon the religious soul that we have come 
to a pass in which we must have more power or we 
shall fail, at that moment more power is on the way. 
Now, what saddens really good people in these days 
is that we are aware of tasks for which, so to speak, 
we have not the capital. We see quite clearly, 
for example, that this whole world of ours might 
come within sight of universal friendliness if it 
would only turn a corner in the human heart : 
but it will not turn that corner. We see that what 
is wanted is that instead of suspicion of one another 
we need love for one another ; or, short of love, 
honesty with one another, or friendliness with one 
another. We see that that would change every- 
thing, just as it changes everything when on a 
gloomy day the sun at length comes out ; or as 
59 


Our Ambiguous Life 

when a feeling of sickness passes and health returns. 
We see that until this better spirit comes we may 
take precautions against our own wilder possibilities 
and we do well to do this ; but even in the midst 
of all our planning we know that until an evil spirit 
has been cast out we are always on the edge of 
perilous possibilities. 

In every region of our life we are aware of 
the same conflict — between ideals which we know 
we might achieve, and a miserable unwillingness 
or incompetence for achieving them. The modern 
world has spent its capital, not only its capital in 
gold and in goods, but its capital of spirits. For 
there is a kind of truth, though it is a truth 
which has been abused, in the doctrine of the 
Intercession of the Saints. There is a real truth, 
I mean to say, in the idea that an age of 
faith — because it is usually an age of industry 
and thrift, to say no more ; it is usually an 
age of self-control, when man’s nervous system 
becomes quiet and stabilized — 'an age of faith 
lays up a store of power, a kind of reserve of spirit 
which a succeeding age may use in its emergency. 
I think it is only fair to say that we to-day have 
exhausted that spiritual potency which was let loose 
upon our particular race in the fifteenth, sixteenth 
and seventeenth centuries. 

Now, it is a ground for one’s hope in God, that so 
it is, and that there are many, a saving portion it 
may be, who are aware of these things. When this 
60 


Revival— The One Thing Assured 

new power which is due descends upon us, it will 
come to us as it has always come — by the way of 
the most sensitive spirits. Just as when the wind 
blows through an aeolian harp it gives birth to music 
because the strings are on the strain. For a slack 
wire blows about in the wind ; the wind can bring 
no music from it. 

I am always grateful to anyone who helps me not 
only to hold a great belief, but to imagine a great 
belief ; to have a kind of picture, that is to say, of 
how the thing is so. Now of recent years two men 
whose business is philosophy, and who fortunately 
acquired a great vogue amongst thoughtful people, 
help my mind wonderfully to picture to itself how 
these great transactions of God can take place and do 
take place : I mean William James and Henri 
Bergson. They gave me a picture, so to speak, 
of God, a ceaseless, urgent spirit, in all things and 
through all things and over all things, seeking a way 
to express Himself or to make Himself known. Now 
when a flood comes — an overflowing river or a rising 
tide — it takes the line of least resistance. It eats 
its way into friable rock or oozes through sand. Even 
so the Spirit of God manifests itself through 
those souls which life and some fundamental strain 
have made most sensitive and unresisting. For 
light may be abroad in the world, but if we shut 
ourselves up in a tower within impenetrable walls we 
shall not be aware that the light is abroad. To 
have light in our chamber we must have a window. 

61 


Our Ambiguous Life 

We must, that is to say, have a medium which 
presents as little obscurity as may be to the element of 
light. And so it is no disparagement of the authen- 
ticity of a movement from the side of God that the 
mighty and the wise and the secure ones are unaware 
of it. 

As it was in the beginning, so it may be once again, 
“ not many wise after the flesh, not many mighty, 
not many noble have part therein ; but God may 
choose the foolish things of the earth that He may 
put to shame them that are wise, and God may 
choose the weak things of the world that He may put 
to shame the things that are strong, and the base 
things of the world and the things that are despised 
may God choose ; yea, and the things that are not, 
that He may bring to nought the things that are, 
that no flesh shall glory before God.” 


62 


VIII 


A DAY IN A THOUSAND 

Now and then there is a day in our life of such 
radiance, of such freedom from care, that looking 
back upon it we say it was “ one in a thousand.” 
Perhaps we exaggerate the glory of it, looking back. 
But even so, it is no disparagement of an experience 
but the very contrary, that it goes on becoming more 
radiant in our memory than we recognized it to be 
while we were in the^midstjof it. We never know 
all that there was in any experience until afterwards, 
and often we do not know until some total change 
has come into our life, out of which we look back 
with longing. 

Days there are of that kind, we must believe, 
even in the greyest of lives. A day of remembered 
sunshine, of wonderful happiness, of a poignant 
release from some misery which had lain upon our 
spirits : a day of deliverance from some burden — 
some burden of pain or disease, or of moral compli- 
cations, or of sheer disaster. 

I think you will find, if you recall strongly any 
such day, that whatever may have been the cause 
of its particular glory, one thing had happened : you 
were in perfect harmony with something outside 
63 


Our Ambiguous Life 

of yourself, something which it may be had been 
absent from your life for a time, or something which 
you had been neglecting. In this latter case a 
great deal of your happiness consisted in the dis- 
covery of this long neglected thing, and in your 
recognition of it as a blessed necessity of your nature. 

Of course there are different levels of such happi- 
ness. There is the sense of the sheer joy of living 
which we have, say, some fine morning when we are 
in the country or on some high upland : what 
Emerson means when he says, “ The first wealth is 
health. The mind that is parallel with the laws of 
nature is strong, with their strength.” There is 
that level : and there is that other in which the 
soul in some great darkness suddenly touches bottom 
and begins to rise and concludes most justly that 
that bottom was God ! 

An illustration of this latter experience which 
occurs to me at the moment is in the one hundred and 
second Psalm. There you have the story of a sorrow- 
ful soul, wandering up and down on the sad plane 
of its sorrows, one unhappy thing recalling another 
until the last speck of blue is blotted out from the 
sky. “ I am like a sparrow alone on a house-top ” ; 
“ my heart is withered like grass ” — so this sad soul 
communes with itself. When suddenly in the very 
middle of the Psalm, the man remembers something 
he had quite forgotten ; he remembers God : and 
from that moment the gloom and burden and 
silence are swept from his spirit. 

64 


A Day in a Thousand 

In both cases, though on such vastly different 
levels, one thing happened — the man found himself 
in a blissful harmony with the surroundings which he 
was yearning for : in the one case the light and the 
freshness of the natural world : in the other case, 
the understanding and sympathy of God. In each 
case, looking back, unless the man has a most 
ungrateful memory, he will say, it was “ a day in a 
thousand.” 

It is part of the art of living, to keep alive within 
ourselves the power of our own good days. To 
believe in them when days of another kind overtake 
us : and not at the first approach of evil to 
speak foolishly concerning God. It is a wonderful 
faculty which none of us, I am sure, uses as we might, 
— and prayer is simply the highest exercise of it — the 
faculty of drawing about our souls the atmosphere 
and surrounding which disposes us to be patient, or 
strong, or faithful, or happy, as the need of the 
moment may be. 

In the eighty-fourth Psalm there is one who tells 
us with a kind of deliberateness which gives weight 
to his opinion, that for him the “ day in a thousand ” 
is the day when he enters the courts of God’s house. 
Now, that is a very remarkable opinion for people 
in our own day to hear. There is no use in people 
pretending, if they need to make pretences, that they 
share this good man’s opinion. What we hear more 
frequently is that the stated day for worship is a 
65 


Our Ambiguous Life 

dull day, which has too long tyrannized over the 
natural gaiety of this land. Well, well, I am not 
going to discuss the matter with people who are 
so opposed to my principles. I should no more 
think of discussing the matter with such people than 
I should argue about melody with one who is deaf, 
or about colour with one who is blind. Indeed, 
the difference between us is greater : for presumably 
a deaf man will like to be informed concerning 
sensations from which he is cut off : and so will a 
blind man. No : to argue about the orderliness 
and the seemliness, and, recalling the wonderful 
history of our country, the necessity for the sus- 
tained reference of ourselves to God — which is the 
very purpose of worship — to argue about that with 
one who supposes that he has made up his mind the 
other way, would be as futile as speaking about 
melody to one who himself meanwhile is making 
a hideous noise, or about colour with one who loves 
colours which to me are quite outrageous. 

“ There is no disputing about tastes ” ; and ulti- 
mately the question between people who love the 
worship of the House of God and people who do not 
love it, is a question of taste. Not that that makes 
it an indifferent matter. Quite otherwise. Our 
taste in such matters is the very flower and ex- 
pression of our true personality. In such matters our 
taste is simply our soul coming to a definite point. 

However, to proceed : for the first step which 
Christian people are going to take into a new time 
66 


A Day in a Thousand 

of great happiness — and I think we are almost ready 
to take it now — is to stop arguing with those who 
do not heartily share our beliefs and even our 
prejudices. 

The fact is, here is a man who tells us that, 
looking back over a considerable experience of life, 
for him there was no single experience which he 
would exchange for a day spent in the courts of the 
Lord’s House. 

We might ask what led this good man to have such 
a passionate preference ? In answer to that, we 
shall have said almost everything when we remem- 
ber that the man who wrote such words was, at 
the moment, a captive in Babylon. “ Absence makes 
the heart grow fonder.” True, and yet if the 
affection is a superficial one, or if the heart is 
a shallow and fickle heart, then it is not true that 
absence makes the heart grow fonder. It is quite 
untrue. In such cases, the other proverb is the 
one which applies : “ out of sight is out of mind.” 
It is only in deep natures and in regard to the more 
beautiful fidelities that absence makes the heart 
grow fonder. There are people whose heart is 
almost on the surface of their life : and they can 
move it here and there and use it for this and that 
as you might move about a piece of furniture. 

But there are others whose heart is in the right 
place, that is, at the centre of their being. And they 
love once only, be their love to God or to man. 
The Psalmist was one of this order. His was the 
67 


Our Ambiguous Life 

love of a deep nature in which to love once is to love 
for ever : and absence or difficulty only tightens the 
grasp of the bands of steel. He had always loved the 
House of God : but he never loved it so much as 
when he was away in a godless place like Babylon. 
The old Sabbath was never so sweet to him, never so 
desirable, as when it was no longer a possible ex- 
perience to him. Perhaps things need to become 
worse before they become better. Perhaps the 
Sabbath must go, or almost go, before at the 
unanimous cry of all good souls it comes back. 

The House of God in the old days of Jerusalem, 
the House of God which this good man yearned for, 
must have been a very wonderful place. If things 
were as they are described in the building of 
Solomon’s temple, it must have been an overwhelm- 
ingly impressive place. By contrast, our churches 
must seem very bare and ugly and unspiritual. 
Yet : it was not that, I am sure it was not that, 
that this good man regretted. He makes no mention 
of the brazen altar, nor of the gold, nor of the 
incense, nor of the trumpets which blared forth 
their joy when the worshippers went up to the altar 
and laid down their offerings. No : what he recalls 
is something which any one of us might recall, if 
after having been brought up in one of our own 
churches, he were now living in some heathen 
country. He recalled the people going up to church. 
And then he recalled them “ praising God.” He 
saw them all standing up singing. He heard the 
68 


A Day in a Thousand 

Word of God being read. Indeed, it was only the 
bare simplicities he recalled, and it was for them his 
heart hungered. In fact, it was for God he yearned, 
for the Living God. My soul is languishing for the 
Living God, he cried, so that I envy the sparrows 
which build their nests in the roof-work of His house. 

What may it be that keeps many people from 
having the same happy love for the great realities 
of God’s House in our day ? 

I believe it is largely — where it is not something 
much more serious — want of thought, want of 
imagination. For think what overpowering things 
are still suggested to a religious spirit even in the 
humblest place of Christian worship ! There lies 
the open Bible ! Now before that Bible could come 
into being, and before it could be freely displayed, 
there needed to be sixteen centuries of Christian 
suffering and protestation, not to speak of the 
thousands of years preceding Christ. So that it is 
no mere book that lies there. It is a Book which 
now rests quietly upon millenniums of fidelity. 
It is borne up by the ghostly hands of the faithful 
dead whose names are written in heaven. There 
it lies ; saved as by fire ; the Word of God wrung 
out of the silence of things by those who were faith- 
ful unto death, endorsed by the experience of Christ, 
corroborated, as to its message from God, by our 
Lord in the moral furnace of Gethsemane and 
Calvary. 


69 


Our Ambiguous Life 

Does it not mark a falling off in imagination, a 
falling off in gratitude, a filling in with rubbish of 
the great depths of the human soul, if any one of 
us should cease to see the glory of this one symbol 
in our religious practice ? 

I am sure that a day is coming when once again 
the Courts of God’s House will be thronged — not 
with those who come to pass an idle hour which 
otherwise might hang heavily upon their hands. 
“ Surely we shall yet praise Thee, O Lord, in the 
Sanctuary.” Surely, as it dawns upon us one by 
one how our life is speeding on, how we are sur- 
rounded by immense spaces before which even stout 
hearts hang back ; surely as we remember each his 
own grief and his own sore, each his own great 
reason for opening his soul or hers to the Saviour of 
the World in gratitude or in necessity — surely a day 
is coming when all who confess the common pathos 
will come together to strengthen themselves in a 
faith which sweetens the bitterness in life and 
resolves its ambiguity. 


70 


IX 


SILENCE 

In my reading the other day I came across words 
and an idea so unusual that I had to stop and think 
about them. “ And it shall come to pass,” said 
Zechariah, “ that when any shall prophesy, then 
his father and his mother that begat him shall 
say unto him, Thou shalt not live.” A prophet 
denouncing his own mystery ! It seemed like 
Carlyle celebrating “ Silence ” in thirty-seven 
rather closely printed volumes. But what possibly 
can be the meaning of these words ? We had 
supposed that “ to prophesy ” was the first obligation 
upon any and every good man. We remember 
how Moses cried out, would that all God’s people 
were prophets. We can understand how from time 
to time the Bible denounces priestcraft : for the 
Reformed Church came into being as a revolt against 
the tyranny and blasphemy of an overbearing 
professional priesthood. But that the Bible should 
here turn round quite as savagely upon prophesying, 
upon preaching, upon the habit or impulse or ten- 
dency of one man to speak in the name of God to 
groups and gatherings of his fellowmen, that to begin 
with we do not understand. Yet here it is, and 
7i 


Our Ambiguous Life 

announced with such sharpness and such absence of 
qualification that there is no escaping it. 


To recover our balance, we sa y there must here 
be something more than meets the eye. There must 
have been something in the situation at the moment 
which made mere preaching or talking offensive 
and inconvenient. Or the prophesying and preach- 
ing which Zechariah is denouncing must have been 
of a base kind, insincere, easy, habitual, popular, 
the thing that minds of a low order produce for hire. 
If the one or the other of these circumstances is 
found to have been the prevailing circumstance of the 
moment, we shall be ready to accept the ruling of the 
prophet and later to see whether there may not be 
some guidance for ourselves in these days of ours 
which have this at least in common with his day, 
that it is no time for half-measures. 


It might very well be that in Zechariah’s day — 
in which certainly something grave seems to have 
been impending — the best service a man could 
render was not by prophesying : it might even be 
by not prophesying, that is to say, by holding his 
tongue. There is a time for doing a thing, and 
there is a time for not doing that very thing, though 
on the whole it may be an excellent thing. We 
blame Nero for fiddling while Rome was burning. 

72 


Silence 


But in doing so we are not disparaging music or 
denying to harmonious sounds their grace. If I 
were walking with a friend by a river in an hour 
which disposed us both to high and serious con- 
versation, and if there and then a child were to fall 
into the water before my eyes, I hope I should show 
that I could do something else in this world besides 
talk, besides even talk about God. 

There is a story from the days of the war which 
must not be allowed to die : a story of some soldiers 
who came into a hut, who rather we should say 
were almost carried into a hut — for they were mud- 
stained, exhausted and shaken in their nerves. 
Some clever girls hurried to them with cups of tea 
which those tired men were beginning to drink 
when the Secretary or Superintendent intervened. 
“ No, no, not yet,” said this good but stupid man, 
“ not yet — first let us have a word about Jesus ! ” 
To whom one of the soldiers answered with a fine 
wit and a fine faith : “ You’re too late, man : she 
has mixed Jesus with the tea ! ” And Stevenson 
has something very penetrating to say about the man 
who will get up and sing “ Home sweet Home ” 
when the heart of everybody present except that 
man himself is tender to the point of breaking with 
some separation. 

And so it may have been that in Zechariah’s day 
things in the public life of the country and in the 
private lives of human beings had reached a pass 
where, in Zechariah’s view, there was something 
73 


Our Ambiguous Life 

better for even a good man to do than talk. It 
would appear that everybody was talking : and what 
everybody is doing has no attractiveness. The 
country, as I have said, was at the moment in a bad 
way. Probably Alexander the Great was about 
to wipe it out as an ox licks up grass. The air was 
still with foreboding, the stillness broken doubtless 
then as always by the laughter and foolishness of the 
baser sort. It was a time when most naturally 
people were asking : What next ? What’s coming ? 
And so then as now there was a fine market for the 
spiritual medicine-man. For then as now there 
were those whose first harmony with life had been 
broken by an earlier war. There were those who, 
seeing the clouds mass on the horizon, grew afraid ; 
there were those who, for themselves and quite 
sincerely, had abandoned hope. There were others 
who found an opportunity for making a livelihood 
out of the timidities and the misgivings and the 
curiosity of crazed and unhappy people. And all 
were speaking, saying this and that, darkening the 
heavens with their words. 

It was in such circumstances and for the general 
good in a time when people were excited and on 
edge, easily aroused, ready to go off at a word or to 
take up a cry which next day would become a 
prejudice, shutting up their minds in a sullen anger ; 
a time when people of the finer sort were 
disillusioned and sad, ready to give up the good fight 
of faith and to fall back upon curious and esoteric 
74 


Silence 


consolations ; it was in such a time and in the final 
interest of men, which is the interest of God, that 
this man Zechariah, as the first step towards sobriety 
and good sense and a possible escape from disaster, 
commanded everybody to keep silence. 

I believe that precisely is the word of God to us 
to-day. Too much of the breath of the world to-day 
is given to talking, to projecting ideas which are really 
not ideas at all but impulses and appetites. We 
have had more than enough of “ I think ” or “ I 
venture to think,” when the fact is the person 
speaking does not mean I think at all, but only 
proposes to indulge himself. It ought not to be 
considered harsh should we for a time have the 
courage to say to such a person, “ We do not care 
greatly at this moment what you think. If 
what you think is worth anything, you yourself 
can now and at this moment begin to act upon it. 
For if you yourself are not acting in accordance 
with your thinking, the fact is that you are not 
thinking at all, but only dreaming or posing. At 
any rate at this moment, everything in turn is being 
said by everybody in turn, so that mere words have 
lost their dignity. The only word of yours which we 
believe is the word which for yourself is so real and 
true that you cannot utter it except in the things 
you do.” 

The only proof that we mean what we say is that 
we act accordingly. This certainly is the contri- 
bution which we Christian people are called upon to 
75 


Our Ambiguous Life 

make towards the quietening and steadying of 
society in our day — we are perhaps not so much to 
speak, as to act in obedience to what seems to us 
most urgent. It may very well be that for some 
considerable time we ought to deny ourselves even 
what we might call the luxuries of faith, restraining 
our religious fancies and not pandering at all to our 
curiosities concerning things future and unseen. We 
may well leave all that to God. It may be that for 
a long time ahead we ought to concentrate upon our 
duty, not so much asking this and that from life 
which is the hand of God, but rather asking our- 
selves how we who have what we have, and this so 
much more than we deserve, may now stop thinking 
too anxiously about ourselves and may give our- 
selves generously to meet the necessity and crisis 
of our time. 

If we believe that we are all suffering to-day from the 
fading in the general mind of the Sense of God, 
then we shall not talk about that, but we shall try 
to put it right. We shall order our own ways so 
that the sense of God shall have more time and more 
room in our life. If we hold, as we may well hold, 
that people to-day hardly ever speak without betray- 
ing their prejudice, and so the general opinion comes 
to be made up of partisan feeling on one side and 
another, in that case, as the Psalmist said “ we shall 
take heed to our ways that we sin not with our 
tongues.” 

And so on and so on. My point is, and it seems 
76 


Silence 


to me to have been Zechariah’s point — when a 
thing occurs to me as true, as a thing which were it 
held generally would assist the world or assist the 
country at this time, I shall not speak about it, 
certainly I shall not be content with merely speaking 
about it, I shall do it ; I shall embody that thing 
in my own practice, making it a part of myself and 
the most real part. 

For what the prophet is inveighing against can 
never have been the warm inevitable utterance of 
good men, which indeed is the only light we mortals 
have in this dark world. What he is inveighing 
against is the uncostly, idle, casual, indulgence of 
ourselves in words, spoken in serious times and often 
concerning serious things, words which even when 
we are uttering them we do not mean seriously, in 
the sense that we do not mean them to have any 
influence with ourselves. What the prophet is 
denouncing is the uttering of opinions which we have 
not weighed, which we simply emit with the view 
it may be of confirming ourselves in some prejudice 
or with the view merely of passing time. 

Against the idle use of words our Lord also gravely 
warns us, telling us that in the end of the day we 
shall be judged by the words we have spoken. 
But it was our Lord also who put this entire matter 
squarely before us, when He told us that in the end 
of the days those who are commended will be 
commended not for the words they have spoken 
but for the deeds they have done : that to them the 
77 


Our Ambiguous Life 

Great Judge will say not “ well imagined,” “ well- 
thought-out,” “ well-proposed,” “ well-intended,” 
“ well-expressed,” but “ well done.” 

For the unfinished is nothing : and a word that is 
unsupported and unconfirmed in a corresponding 
deed — is an unfinished thing. 


78 


X 


AN ECHO OF THE TEMPTATION 

We learn from S. John that one day during the last 
week of our Lord’s life on earth, some Greeks — ■ 
from Galilee doubtless or beyond — asked to see Jesus ; 
that Philip and Andrew went to their Master as a 
kind of deputation fron those Greeks ; and we are 
told with pointedness the effect that this request 
had upon our Lord’s mind. We might have 
supposed that the whole incident was a small one 
which the Evangelist, looking back upon the crowd- 
ing events of that week, might have neglected ; 
but there is no doubt whatever that we are intended 
by the very prominence which is given to the 
incident, and by the effect which it is described as 
having had upon our Lord— we are meant, I say, 
so far as we are able, to make clear to ourselves 
what it may have signified. 

I should like to make clear to myself what that 
little incident, described so poignantly, may have 
meant to our Lord. 

When Philip and Andrew came to Jesus telling 
Him that there were Greeks present who wanted to 
see Him, we read that Jesus made no answer. He 
79 


Our Ambiguous Life 

did not say that He would see them ; or that He 
would not see them. We are told of the effect that 
it had upon His own Spirit. And what was that 
effect ? Not a happy one. Indeed the effect 
seems to have been that it opened up something 
like an old wound in the soul of Jesus ; that it 
confronted Him anew with some inward contro- 
versy and debate which He had supposed had been 
finally settled. The story, as S. John tells it, un- 
doubtedly makes upon us this impression, that it 
plunged our Lord once again into something of the 
nature of a trial, something in the nature of what He 
Himself called “ a temptation.” It was as though 
some alternative which, in an earlier struggle, He 
had turned His back upon, once more confronted 
Him ; as though He saw another way offering 
itself to Him and inviting Him, a way nevertheless 
which had presented itself to Him at some earlier 
time, and at that earlier time, having weighed all 
things, He had moved on, leaving it — a forbidden 
door — to close behind Him. 

We read that our Lord groaned within Himself ; 
that for a little time He was rapt in prayer, and in 
a form of prayer which was a struggle. He prayed 
that the hour might pass from Him ; that He might 
be spared the agony of a hesitating and divided 
mind ; that He might go on on the path which, 
in the great hour of His vocation, He had chosen, 
not distracted by this possibility and alternative 
which in some way had offered itself to Him once 
80 


An Echo of the Temptation 

again with the news that those Greeks had asked 
to see Him. 

What does this mean, in the sense of what does this 
conceal ? 

This inquiry of the Greeks re-opened for one 
moment, I cannot but think, that discussion which 
took place in the depths of our Lord’s soul in the days 
of His temptation in the wilderness. Would He, 
Jesus, not be wiser to live out His life and to deliver 
His message in that freer and more generous world 
outside Judaism ? Was there not something in the 
natural religion of the heart of man which offered 
a more promising field than here amongst those 
prejudiced Jews ? Why should He fling Himself 
against the barriers of that prejudice ? Why should 
He, whose soul was full of such generous ideas and 
hopes for man, enter into a hot and narrow and bitter 
atmosphere in which, if He persisted, He could 
only be torn to pieces ? Why not leave Jerusalem and 
its people and its traditions, and sail for the open 
seas, dealing with man upon the broad basis of his 
acknowledged needs ? All that dawned upon Him, 
all that came back upon Him once again when, 
surrounded as He was by the deepening bitterness 
of His own people, He heard the easier course calling 
to Him. Once again the tempter drew near to 
Him and whispered the old seduction to His soul, 
taking Him again up into a high mountain and 
showing Him all the kingdoms of the earth and the 
glory of them, and saying, “ All these will I 
81 


Our Ambiguous Life 

give Thee if Thou wilt — .” Wilt what ? If Thou 
wilt let go that last loyalty of Thy soul to the God 
of Thy fathers ! 

I shall say no more as to the history of the incident 
and as to the principles which the incident embodied. 
But I may have said enough to enable ourselves 
to see in the steadfastness of our Lord face to face 
with that seduction another fine thread of meaning 
in the immense loyalty to God and to man which 
Christ has established in the world. 

There come to us also one by one waves of the same 
seduction. There are times when we look out 
from what seems the narrowness and bondage of 
our personal life, and a voice seems to come to us 
from a wider and freer world, asking us why we 
should continue, why we should hold on. We can 
even make ourselves believe that we should be much 
happier were we to yield to this vague voice which 
makes much of the advantage of liberty. We go on 
to say to ourselves that any life we lead or any work 
we do in a happier spirit is likely to be more honour- 
ing to God and more helpful to the world ; that 
meanwhile and in any case we have done our best, 
that we have come “ unto our own and our own have 
received us not ” ; that we know that there is no 
call upon us to be sad and unhappy, and narrow 
and old before our time. It is the voice of the 
Greeks calling us : and the voice of the Cross holds 
us back. For we see, as our Blessed Lord saw, 
indeed we see it now because He saw it then, that to 
82 


An Echo of the Temptation 

yield to this more specious voice is really to abandon 
the great and holy view of life ; it is to blow out 
our private light ; it is to outrage our deepest sense of 
honour ; it is to suppress something so deep within 
us that if we were to trample upon it and over its 
prostrate body were to step out into something 
which seems to us liberty and ease, we might 
be happy for a day or for a week or for a year. But 
the old things would come back again, the fine things, 
the things of such a kind that when we are faithful 
to them we know at least that we can lift up our 
face to Christ without shame. These things would 
come back upon us and it would be as though we 
heard His very voice saying to us, with a tone that 
would break our very hearts to hear, “ What ! 
could you not watch with Me one hour ? ” 


“ And so,” I said, “ Good-bye to London ! ” We said no more, 
but watched the South-side streets below — bright gleams of light 
and movement, and the dark, dim monstrous shapes of houses 
and factories. We ran through Waterloo Station, London Bridge, 
New Cross, St. John’s. We never said a word. It seemed to me 
that for a time we had exhausted our emotions. We had escaped, 
we had cut our knot, we had accepted the penalty. That was all 
settled. That harvest of feelings we had reaped. I thought now 
only of London, of London as the symbol of all we were leaving and 
all we had lost in the world. I felt nothing now but an enormous 
and overwhelming regret. . . . Then, suddenly, stabbing me 

to the heart, came a vision of Margaret’s tears, and the sound of her 
voice. ... I came out of a cloud of thoughts to discover 
the narrow compartment with its feeble lamp overhead, and our 
rugs and hand-baggage swaying in the rack, and Isabel very still in 
front of me, gripping some wilting red roses tightly in her bare and 
ringless hands. 


83 


Our Ambiguous Life 


For a moment I could not understand her attitude, and then 
I perceived she was sitting bent together with her head averted from 
the light to hide the tears that were streaming down her face. She 
had not got her handkerchief out for fear I should see this, but I saw 
her tears, dark drops of tears upon her sleeve. 

For a time I stared at her and was motionless in a sort of still and 
weary amazement. Why had we done this injury to one another ? 
Why ? Then something stirred within me. 

“ Isabel,” I whispered. 

She made no sign. 

“ Isabel ! ” I repeated, and then crossed over to her, crept closely 
to her, put my arm about her, and drew her wet cheek to mine. 


So ends a great modern story . 1 But surely this 
sad way is the wrong way. It is not that they are 
suffering which proves that they are wrong. Their 
chief suffering is that they know they are wrong. 

“ Sail in there,” cried an old admiral, when the 
fight had gone against him, “ sail in there : for I 
have taken the soundings, and when they sink my 
ship, the flag at the mast-head will still be flying.” 
That is the language of a man whose heart is with him 
in the deep waters. But “ wet cheeks, silence, 
wilting red roses ” — these are signs that their own 
hearts have gone out of the business. 

“ Now is my soul troubled and what shall I say ? 
Father save Me from this hour.” There the storm 
is at its height. But next moment we hear, 
“ But for this hour came I into the world. Father, 
glorify Thy Name ” ; and we know that the fight 
is over, that the “ elements rage, the fiend-voices 
that rave ” have sunk into silence ; and it is as 
though the moon had come out upon a peaceful sea. 

1 Quoted in Ancestral Voices. 


84 


XI 


THE LATER DEMAND OF LIFE 

It would be a strange thing indeed if Jesus who saw 
everything, especially who saw everything that was 
beautiful and suggestive of God His Father, should 
not have seen the beauty of the young lives that were 
round about Him. We know that He saw little 
children, and took them into His arms and blessed 
them ; that in fact He played with them. And 
there was something so utterly beautiful about the 
scene that a rich and uneasy man who happened to 
be looking on, was so moved by it that, after Jesus 
had waved good-bye to the little children, this rich 
young ruler ran after Him and said in effect, “ Master, 
what must I do that I may stand in the light which 
I saw just now round Thee and those little child- 
ren ? ” It is as though He had said, “ I am a rich 
man and can buy this and that. I can hire certain 
attentions from the world. But as Thou wast 
standing there with those little children, some- 
thing went soft in my own breast, and I said to 
myself, ‘ that is life ; that is the eternal life, to be 
won not with money or with price.’ ” 

We must never forget that the Gospels do not 
give us anything approaching to a complete life of 
85 


Our Ambiguous Life 

Jesus. They deal rather with our Lord’s behaviour 
in certain critical situations, quoting His words, 
His decisions, recalling His attitude face to face with 
problems and facts which will always trouble serious 
men. Perhaps it was to give Christ’s ruling on such 
difficult matters that fragments of His life-story were 
brought together and circulated in the early Church. 
But all that I wanted to say at the moment about 
that was that we should be wrong to conclude that 
Jesus had not seen this or that which is beautiful 
in life because there is no express record of His 
having seen it. And so I return to my opening 
sentence to complete what was in my mind. 

It would be a strange thing, I was saying, if Jesus, 
who had such an eye for the beautiful and reassuring 
things in life, for the lilies of the field, the faces of 
little children, did not notice and take great delight 
in the happiness of those young lives round about 
Him which were just moving into manhood and 
moving into maidenhood. 

Certainly we have one story of His which 
shows us that He had noticed the freshness and 
innocence of young girls. I seem to recall from my 
reading of Emerson how once when he is celebrating 
in his sky-blue way the bracing things of life — 
mountains, seas, rivers, flowers, the great thoughts of 
men, and so forth — he suddenly remembers young 
girls and introduces in the long list of uplifting things 
their bright faces. I know, too, that the great 
Russian novelist, Turgeniev, sees in the young 
86 


The Later Demand of Life 


Russian girl of his time the one recalling and saving 
presence. It is as though he were saying, “ so long 
as they are what in my high thought of them they 
are indeed, life will not lose its lyrical quality.” 

There is a story I was saying in which Jesus 
speaks about young girls, and although it is a grave 
story its graveness is not a thing to be wondered at. 
For there is no time when we are so disposed to a 
serious and anxious view of life as when we look 
upon things of beauty which in this rude world 
may so easily be smirched and broken, or hear gay 
voices which may one day be choked with grief. 

I am sure it is this concern for the perilous position 
of beautiful creatures, this sense of the danger 
besetting life’s finer and more fragile products, 
which accounts for the sadness and preoccupation 
of the whole of Burne Jones’ artistic work. So at 
least it seems to me. In all his drawings and pictures 
he appears to me to be trying to break the later 
news of life to young girls and especially to young 
girls who have been gently reared, who also have 
some power to reflect. It is as though he were 
saying, “ I should like to spare you ; I should like 
you to go on being young girls, gay, with no hard 
experience in your lives on until the end. And if I 
had my will your passing from this fair world at last 
would be as when a white bird spreads its wings and 
rises — with no gate of death. But that cannot be.” 

And now for our Lord’s own story. We call it 
the parable of the Ten Virgins. It would be as 
87 


Our Ambiguous Life 

accurate to call it the parable of the Ten Maidens, 
or indeed to call it “ A Story of Ten Young Girls.” 

These ten girls, said Jesus, set out, following a 
happy custom, to meet a bridegroom and his 
bride and to accompany them to a bridal feast. 
They took with them each a lamp. Five of them, 
said Jesus, were wise ; and five were foolish. I 
do not think our Lord meant to speak harshly of 
those whom He called foolish. He simply meant 
that they did not know what was before them. 
The five who were wise and prudent took with them 
oil in their lamps and in addition each took a supply 
of oil. The five young girls who were foolish — 
who were, that is to say, not wise — took with them 
only the oil in their lamps. That is to say, those five 
made no provision for any unusual demand. They 
did not think of life as something which calls for 
precautions. If things turned out all right, then 
they were all right. They had enough oil for the 
occasion if the occasion should take place precisely 
as they wished it would. If the bride and bride- 
groom arrived at the likely moment, they had enough 
oil to keep their lamps burning until they should 
meet them. But what made them foolish was that 
they had nothing to fall back upon if things should 
turn out contrary. And so our Lord called them 
foolish, not harshly, but affectionately, and indeed, 
sadly. 

I am sure it is what He would wish to say to all 
young people, youths and maidens, at this moment, 


The Later Demand of Life 


were He speaking to them face to face. He would 
say that this life of ours is never from first to last 
plain sailing. Things never really from first to last 
take the course which we, especially when we are 
young, would like them to take. And so it is always 
wise to have resources to fall back upon, that we may 
not be taken unawares, or thrown into any amaze- 
ment. 

In our Lord’s story those ten young girls up to a 
certain point were all alike, all young, all happy, 
and fit to deal with life as life so far had presented 
itself to them. And then something happened 
which made a difference. In the case of five of them, 
they went on being happy, carrying forward into 
their maturer life their girlish grace. In the case of 
the other five, something happened ; and because 
they could not deal with it when it came to them 
they missed something so that their later life was 
in a real sense spoiled. And Jesus said that in their 
case this need not have happened if they had only 
been wise. Perhaps their mothers should have told 
them some things “ before they came to pass,” as 
Jesus told His disciples and for the very reason, 
that when they did come to pass they might not 
become bitter or stand at a loss. As it was, when 
their first light went out they had nothing to fall 
back upon. 

In all this Jesus is speaking to everyone, but 
especially is He speaking to young girls. If the sun 
were always shining, and if life produced only 
89 


Our Ambiguous Life 

flowers, we might all of us pass through it with our 
joy undimmed, on the resources with which nature 
endowed us. But the sun is not always shining, and 
nature produces creatures other than flowers. There 
are things in life and in every life for which we 
require insight and faith. George Meredith in a 
stirring but very silly couplet asks: 

“ Into the breast that gave the rose 
Shall I with shuddering fall i ” 

But that is a very trifling way to state our human 
task. If he suggests by his question that in this life 
there is nothing to be feared — well, I don’t mind 
arriving at that conclusion and I have arrived at 
that conclusion. But it is a conclusion to which 
I arrive only by faith in something deeper than 
the merely natural order. If nature produced 
nothing but flowers it might be a fair rebuke 
to timid souls to ask them why they should be afraid 
in a world which has never given them any cause for 
fear. But we know that nature produces other 
things besides roses ; nature produces the worm 
that gnaws at the heart of the rose, choosing also 
by a disquieting preference the rose that is fairest. 
Nature produces snakes, cobras, and all the slimy 
creeping things which it makes us shrink even to 
contemplate. If Meredith means his question as 
a serious contribution to the solution of life, then he 
ought to put it in sterner terms and ask, “ Into the 
breast that gave the cobra shall I with shuddering 
90 


The Later Demand of Life 


fall ? ” To this the answer I should say will 
always be — rather ! 

But this is to be more controversial than I wanted 
to be. All that I wanted to take from that story of 
Jesus which we call “ The Parable of the Ten 
Virgins,” and which I am calling “ A Story of Ten 
Young Girls,” is just this. Life suggests to us all 
that we find some resource deeper than the apparent 
aspect of things on which we may fall back when 
the need arises. By falling back I do not mean 
that face to face with contradicting things we 
should become afraid and lose heart and cease to go 
forward. What I mean is that unless we have some 
deeper, more reflective, way of conceiving this life 
of ours, we shall not survive certain experiences 
which are inevitable to all of us. 

Perhaps I can most discreetly say all that I want 
to say by telling a story which I take from my own 
correspondence of some years ago. 

I think it was just before the war broke out that 
I had some poems sent me obviously from the hand 
of a young girl. They showed real feeling and were 
the work of a fresh and upright heart. Then came 
the war. Thereafter the poems which this young 
girl sent me, whose name I do not know and whom 
I have never seen, became, as was natural, more 
sententious. Reading between the lines it seemed 
to me that someone very dear to herself was facing 
death daily in some battle-area. Still later her 
verses became most poignant. Her first natural 
9i 


Our Ambiguous Life 

faith had obviously foundered on some horrid rock. 
It seemed to me, indeed, still reading between the 
lines, that this one who was dear to her had fallen 
on the battle-field. For a time the poems persisted 
in an exalted mood, the young heart beating against 
the silence, seeking to comfort itself in the hope of 
re-union beyond this stricken life. 

One day a letter reached me from her, short, 
sudden, hard. The light that was in her had 
become darkness. She asked me to burn all her 
verses ! That she recalled and regretted them all ! 
That she saw nothing in life but a field of senseless 
incident ! I wrote to her as I could, but I have 
heard nothing since. 

Such is the effect which experience might have 
upon any bright and eager spirit unfortified by a 
personal faith. To go out into life without such a 
faith, to go out into life trusting to one’s temper- 
ament, to one’s natural spirits, or to circumstances, 
is to go out with oil in our lamp indeed, but with 
none in reserve. And by the testimony of all deep- 
seeing and sympathetic souls, if there is one thing 
true of human experience it is this, that it calls 
upon our reserves. 

But there is no end to the resources which they 
have who take life as seeing Him who is invisible. 
Jesus, from whom we may humbly learn faith, 
tasted life and death for us all. To Him life gave as 
His portion pain, misunderstanding, loss of friends — 
all that this world reckons as defeat. Life led Him 


92 


The Later Demand of Life 

by the way of Gethsemane and Calvary to what 
looked like utter solitude. He called that solitude 
the very breast of God. To such as take life from 
His hand and on His terms, the evil in things may 
come, but it findeth nothing in them. They 
believe in God — for Christ’s sake. 


93 


XII 


“ HOW MANY LOAVES HAVE YE ? ” 

It is quite evident that the disciples when they 
uttered the words which provoked this retort from 
their Master were off their guard. There is a temper 
in what they said, a want of seriousness and of 
humility, a certain heat and fullness which show us, 
who ourselves know very well the kind of mood, that 
they were not restraining themselves, that they were 
giving way. For that very reason, because the words 
were evidently not planned, were not the result of 
deliberation, because they had not been checked in 
the utterance and altered and thus destroyed as a 
natural expression, they are all the more to be 
trusted as the disclosure in certain particular 
circumstances of a mood or attitude of mind which 
is common to us all. When we have taken time to 
think, to weigh the consequences of our words, our 
words cease to be a revelation of ourselves : they are 
rather our appreciation of the whole situation. 
Our sudden words are, from one point of view, our 
own, and just for that reason they are not only ours, 
for they are the expression and momentary triumph 
in us of some ancient weakness or passion or glory 
of man. In our sudden unpremeditated words we 
94 


“How many loaves have ye?” 

expose ourselves ; but at the same time we betray 
the race. It is the opening up for an instant of a 
deep central fire. 

For this reason, just because the words of the 
disciples in this place are quick and unrestrained, 
they express a mood which was not peculiar to 
themselves, but which is natural and inveterate, 
threatening us all in different ways when we 
are in the same circumstances. “ Whence should 
we have so many loaves in a desert place as to fill 
a great multitude ? ” So we also incline to speak 
when God in His own obscure but undeniable ways 
is laying some demand upon us, urging us out to some 
sacrifice, or to some higher behaviour in the world. 
We plead the magnitude of the work, the apparent 
absurdity of the idea, the hopelessness of it, con- 
sidering our miserable resources ; when the real 
fact is, we are unwilling, we have fallen out of 
communion with the living God — who indeed is 
the only ground of hope. 

And in our Lord’s swift reply to these disciples 
“ How many loaves have ye ? ” I hear God’s 
eternal rebuke of our faintheartedness, His pene- 
trating exposure of the source of all our slackness 
and inability ; that the difficulties of the human 
situation arise from our personal doubt and un- 
willingness with regard to God. In these words of 
the disciples, we have the reluctance and spirit of 
discussion, which rise to the surface when God lays 
some order upon our souls : and in our Lord’s 
95 


Our Ambiguous Life 

reply, we have the answer which the eternal spirit 
of good urges at the very moment, as we ourselves 
must admit if we will stay for a moment and not 
harden our hearts. “ How can we fill four 
thousand ? ” — “ How many loaves have ye ? ” 

“ How can we live at such a height of goodness ? ” 
“ Are you willing to set out ? ” “ Do you 

really wish to be good at all ? ” said the secret voice 
of Christ. 

“ Wilt Thou be silent for ever, O Lord ? ” we cry 
as we look out upon things as they are. “ Do thine 
own part,” is the only answer from the heavens. 

Jesus did not ask the disciples to feed the four 
thousand. He asked them to bring out such bread 
as they had. He did not ask them to do every- 
thing at once : He asked them to do something : 
to begin. Now that is all God asks of us : but He 
looks for that. It is as we do what we can that 
more gets done than we ever could have done — for 
there God finds His opportunity through us. If 
you consider for a moment you will see that great 
results are accomplished, rather they accomplish 
themselves , when we do our small but necessary part. 
It is as if — what indeed is the case — there lay behind 
us and within all things and all souls a great sea of 
power, the unfathomed energy of God, which by 
our willingness or unwillingness we let loose or 
hinder. You find examples everywhere. A little 
child at a certain age feels the instinct to walk. 
But he cannot. Does he therefore do nothing at 
Q6 


“How many loaves have ye?” 

all, because he cannot do everything at once ? No ! 
he does his best. He tries ; and by trying he puts 
himself in touch with secret forces which are lying 
in wait to assist him. He does what he can, and 
soon he can do more. Meanwhile, his weak- 
ness, his untrained eye, his unsteady limbs all seem 
to say “ How can I ever attain to such an enter- 
prise as walking ? ” But the voice of his own 
instinct, the voice of the future, keeps urginghim. 
“ What can you do ? do that ! ” It is a parallel 
on the purely physical level — if there is any level 
of life which is purely physical and where mental 
and spiritual qualities are not also engaged — of 
the disciples’ mood and our Lord’s instruction. 
“ Whence have we so many loaves in a desert place 
as to fill so great a multitude ? ” said they; “How 
many loaves have ye ? ” said He. 

The same thing happens when a young mind 
faces the world of knowledge, when he begins to read, 
to reckon, to think. There is a sense of pain. The 
demand is too great. The young mind feels itself 
depressed and timid before the sudden task. Look- 
ing into the new world of things to be learned the 
child is confused, and at a loss : he feels himself 
stupid and unfit. But his teacher does not say 
“You must overtake all that in a day.” No, he 
gives the child a small task, small but definite, 
a task which tries all the powers he meanwhile has. 
The child is asked to learn something, to get to know 
something ; and behold, when he has learned that, 
97 


7 


Our Ambiguous Life 

he is ready for more, and is capable of more. He 
is like a man climbing a mountain. Each step he 
takes is not only a step towards the top and thus 
towards the end of his task ; but each step he takes 
shows him more of the world. He sees a village 
that lay hidden, or the windings of a river, or 
the smoke of some far-off city, or, on the 
horizon, the sea. Just so, each step a child takes 
into his own small world of learning is not 
merely a new fact received but it is also a new 
power acquired. At each the child grows not only 
in knowledge, but — and this is the more valuable 
result — acquires through all these small successes, a 
certain hopefulness and zest — the feeling that 
infinite as is this world which is yet to be known by 
him, somehow he is equal to the task : that he has 
in capacity what the world has in extent. In short, 
by doing the definite thing he could, the child 
finds he can do more. In that first feeling of 
difficulty and bewilderment, when the child settled 
down to his wide and hopeless task, you have the very 
mood of the disciples here, “ What can I do in the 
face of such a demand ? ” And in our Lord’s reply, 
“ How many loaves have ye ? ” we have the other 
voice, the voice of the future man urging the child, 
the voice which a wise teacher seeks to strengthen, 
“ What can you do ? Do that, and you will find 
that you can do more than that.” 

You see the principle underlying the complaint 
of the disciples and our Lord’s answer. “ We cannot 
98 


“How many loaves have ye?” 

feed four thousand,” said they; “ How many can 
you feed ? ” said He. “ There’s too much to be 
done,” we say, and He answers, “ Are you doing 
your part ? ” “ I’ve no hope of the world. Things 

seem to be going from bad to worse.” So we some- 
times feel, but swift on the back of that thought, 
there comes the earnest questioning, if we will only 
stay and listen, “ Am I doing my share of the work ; 
am I myself living entirely on the side of God, am I 
myself looking for and hastening the day of the 
Lord ? ” Or the secret controversy may be con- 
cerned not so much with the human situation as 
with our own personal life. “ I can never be so 
good as a Christian ought to be ? ” we say. To 
which Christ answers, “ Are you really willing to be 
a Christian at all ? ” 

Or, “ I have no opportunity to be good,” we 
say ; to which He, speaking within us, answers, “ Just 
consider for a moment whether you have none.” 

“ I am nobody,” we say. “ You’re somebody,” 
says He. 

“ Had I the wings of a dove, how I would fly on 
the errands of God ! how good I should be ! ” To 
which a sober voice replies, rebuking us for such 
empty sighing, “ You have not wings, therefore 
God will not blame you for the want of them. 
But hands you have, and feet.” Or we may be in 
that mood which exaggerates the difficulties in the 
way of the faith in God. “ We cannot know God 
to perfection,” we say ; “ how can we ever be quite 
99 


Our Ambiguous Life 

sure ? ” But we feel ourselves answered from 
within : “ Be true to what you do know about 
God. Follow the light which is never quite absent 
from simple and obedient souls.” 

Well, that is really all I have to say. It is, how- 
ever, a great deal if we will receive it honestly and 
apply it to ourselves simply and strictly. Let us see 
for a moment how this principle works in certain 
cases. 

For example : there is one, let us suppose, who 
feels that he or she is very far from the style and tone 
of life which he or she should be leading. You 
know quite well how you are living , and you know 
how you ought to be living. You are aware of weak- 
nesses and excesses. Indeed it may be that serious 
thoughts of any kind make you uncomfortable, for 
they seem to accuse you, and to bring division into 
your life. You feel the demand which Jesus 
Christ makes of us all to be good, to have done with 
self-pleasing as a pursuit — you feel that to be a real 
strain upon you, a burden. (It would be easy to 
show that the strain, the sense of burden is there, 
not because something decisively good is being asked 
of you ; but simply because all that is best in you, 
your true self, is wishing to get out of its bondage 
into the liberty of a complete surrender, and you are 
resisting it, you are holding back, you are keeping 
down the glorious upward movement of your soul.) 
But take it that you simply feel the Christian 
demand for character, for quality of life, to be too 
ioo 


“How many loaves have ye?” 

great. Well now, apply the principle of our Lord’s 
words here and you will see whether you are sincere. 
The disciples could not feed the four thousand, and 
yet as it turned out they did not know how many 
they could feed until they began to give away what 
they had. They found — what we are always 
finding when we allow our good inspirations to 
carry us so far — they found that they never came to 
the end of the bread they had to give away ! So 
you will find if you really set out in obedience to that 
better view of life which, I will believe, haunts and 
offers itself to us all in those moments which, we 
know, go to the making of us. If you would take 
one real step, even a short one — but because it is 
the first it must be a step over your own heart, 
over your old nature — you will be amazed at the new 
world which will break upon you, at the new spiritual 
joys which will greet you and welcome you home. 
Cross the frontier by even one step, and you are in 
a new climate, a new sky, a new world, a new air, 
with a new sense of yourself, a new idea of all that by 
the same grace of God you are capable of. This 
is the great disadvantage under which preaching 
must always labour — nothing in the sphere of 
personal religion becomes true for you until you have 
discovered it for yourself, until God has revealed it 
to you. To be speaking about the joy, the newness of 
life, which is waiting to receive you just on the other 
side of the frontier the very moment you abandon 
your resistance to the surging entreaties of the 

IOI 


Our Ambiguous Life 

good spirit within you — to be speaking of these things 
is like speaking of human love, or of the power of 
mountain scenery to terrorize and cleanse the soul — 
you agree with me or you do not : and even if you 
do agree it is not because of anything I say but 
because you have felt it all. And so we believers 
must wait, we must wait on those whom we would 
like to convince ; we must wait on God, wait on life, 
wait on the movements of their own souls to bring 
them to the right point of view and to open their 
eyes as to what was always there for the seeing, for 
the knowing. “ O taste and see how gracious the 
Lord is,” cried a good man, I believe, in a kind of 
despair. 

“ You cannot be everything that Christ wants you 
to be ? 99 But, begin anywhere. There is deep 
truth in an old saying of the Greek moralists, that 
if you really have one virtue you have all the virtues. 
It would help many of us, I am sure, out of that 
vague sense of helplessness before all the require- 
ments of a religious life, if we set ourselves to master 
faithfully one requirement. It is one sign that 
religion is becoming a real and personal thing with 
us when we are candid enough to cry to God for 
the very thing we know we need — when, having 
become aware of some weakness or excess in our 
behaviour, we deal with it in particular, and begin 
to judge ourselves — if we judge ourselves at all — 
according to the measure in which we have triumphed 
over that one besetting sin. 

102 


“How many loaves have ye?” 

To return ; it may bewilder and dishearten 
us to think of the long distance we have to go before 
we attain to a solidly good and Christian life. But 
nothing is surer than this that we never have such 
feelings in the actual moments of faithful living. 
We lose the sense of distance and of difficulty the 
very moment we turn our face with the entire con- 
sent of our will. “ While he was yet a great way off 
his father saw him and ran and fell on his neck and 
kissed him.” In the kingdom of the spirit, the 
moment we set out we are at home : the moment we 
begin we are bathed in light. But once more you 
can never know anything of this, of the miracle of 
wings, until away down in your own heart the ancient 
battle is over, and Christ is on the throne. The 
miracle cannot take place until you are willing. 
The bread does not multiply until you begin to hand 
it out. 

Once more ; there may be one who feels prompted 
to begin a new life ; but he is afraid he might not 
be able to hold out for long. It is quite true : we 
all do well to be afraid. So long as we are afraid 
that we may not hold out, we shall hold out. It is 
true courage to be rightly afraid. Still to these the 
Good Spirit says “ How many loaves have ye ? ” 
And once more, you do not know just now how God 
will help you further on. Our faith is a lamp to our 
feet. As we go forward, it goes forward. Is not 
that enough ? Is not that all we need ? We must 
gather the manna every day. Old manna has 

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Our Ambiguous Life 

ceased to be food. The feet of the priests were in 
the Jordan, before the waters separated and a path- 
way appeared. So God works always. “ He 
shows sufficient of His light for us in the dark to 
rise by.” But this principle has applications in 
every region of our life, for indeed it is our peculiar 
discipline and task in this world — to grow, to learn, 
to rise, to become. It is a kind and gracious 
principle ; it is a comforting promise to everyone 
who is in earnest. It tells us that there is no end 
to what we may become in the way of character 
and beauty of soul. That we have always something 
more to give so long as we keep on giving. That 
the water rises in the well the more, the more we 
draw. That there is no limit or end to any faculty 
of the soul which meanwhile we are exercising, or 
devoting to a cause. We always know that it could 
take us further if we would but consent. And so 
within faithful souls whose days are linked to each 
other in true piety, the great confidence gathers 
in and takes up its abode, that “ goodness and mercy 
shall follow us all the days and we shall dwell in the 
house of the Lord for ever.” 

But, and with this thought I close, the words 
of this text are not only kind, they are searching too, 
as indeed all kind words are. 

“ His disciples say unto him — ‘ Whence should 
we have so much bread as to fill so great a multi- 
tude ? 9 And Jesus saith unto them — tf How many 
loaves have ye ? ’ ” 


104 


“How many loaves have ye?” 

Surely it all means that we should make no in- 
sincere excuses for not doing as we ought to do and 
not living as we ought to live. “ We cannot do 
everything,” we say. But our Lord speaking in the 
deep places of our spirit says “ Do something.” “ I 
cannot be a saint,” we say. And He says, “ Set 
yourself against even one sin.” “ I do not see 
how the whole world is ever to be brought to the 
knowledge of Christ. The whole Foreign Mission- 
ary enterprise is a dream.” And yet Christ saw 
quite plainly how the whole world could be saved. 
And even I begin to see how it can be done when- 
ever I meet another one who sees. And if this hope 
for the whole human family be a dream, it was never 
our dream : we were never good enough to have 
such a dream. It was the dream of Jesus, the dream 
which in His life and in His death He obeyed as 
being the very truth of things. 

“ And His disciples say unto Him, Whence should 
we have so much bread in the wilderness, as to fill 
so great a multitude ? And Jesus saith unto them, 
How many loaves have ye ? ” 


105 


XIII 


HOW WHAT’S IN COMES OUT 

S. Paul speaks somewhere of “ the goodness and 
severity of God ” : the Gospels leave upon our 
minds a sense of the goodness and severity of Jesus. 
For a long time now and very properly we have all 
been dwelling upon those aspects of His teaching 
which are merely generous and benevolent. Or, 
if we recalled any words of His which are severe 
and threatening, they have been words which apply 
to those who act harshly towards their fellow-men, 
and so even those severe quotations strengthened the 
case for Christ’s general benevolence. And yet, 
no one can read the Gospels without encountering 
words of Jesus which take us back to the Hebrew 
tradition of moral retribution, reminding us, with 
the tone of many a passage from the Psalms, that 
we live in a world where things are related one to 
another, actions to reactions, deeds to consequences, 
and thought to life. 

I am thinking at this moment of a very severe 
saying quoted by S.Mark and by S. Luke : “ There 
is nothing covered that shall not be revealed, and hid 
that shall not be known. Wherefore whatsoever 
ye have said in the darkness shall be heard in the light, 
106 


How what's in comes out 

and what ye have spoken in the ear in the inner 
chambers, shall be proclaimed upon the house-tops.” 
These words become all the more serious when we 
perceive that our Lord in using them is not utter- 
ing a threat but is simply stating a fact. That, I 
say, makes the words more serious. A threat : 
why, that is something which we may avoid. Some- 
thing may turn up in our favour to save us from 
consequences which, we may admit, are the usual 
consequences. Whether or not a mere threat will 
come true depends upon circumstances, upon time 
and chance, and any one of the necessary conditions 
may fail to act at the right moment, so that the work 
of retribution may be delayed for a time, or spoiled 
altogether. But it is quite different in the case of a 
fact. A fact is a fact. A fact is a thing which has 
already happened, though we may have to wait 
for a time before we realize all that has happened. 
The difference between words which convey a threat 
and words which state a fact is like the difference in 
necessary effect of my saying to a man, “ If you go 
on as you are going, you will fall into a trap,” and my 
saying to him, “ Something has already come to 
you from which there is no escape. You are in a 
trap now. You think you are free ; you are not free. 
You are simply excited and your excitement is itself 
proof to me that you are desperately caught.” In 
the one case it is as though I were warning a man 
of a danger that lies ahead of him. In the other case 
it is as though I were telling a man that he has already 
107 


Our Ambiguous Life 

in his body the seed of some inexorable disease. 
And words of this latter kind are, I repeat, more 
serious. What still lies ahead of us we may imagine 
that we shall somehow escape, whereas in the latter 
case there is no escape ; the thing which we would 
escape from has become part of ourselves. 

In these severe words of Jesus, our Lord is saying 
in effect that what is in comes out ; that we are all 
of us steadily becoming what all the time we are ; 
that our deeper self is all the time gaining upon our 
more obvious self. We are apt to think that what we 
are becoming is the effect upon us of circumstances, 
but that is never quite the case. Before circumstances 
can have any decisive effect upon us something within 
ourselves must co-operate or assent. An experience 
which makes one person bitter may have the effect 
of making another person soft and tender and 
suppliant. There is this difference in result 
because there was a difference in the men’s souls. 

When that wild man, Shimei, the son of Gera, 
cursed David and threw stones at him, it made Joab 
who heard him furious ; but it made David, who 
also heard him, gentle. For a moment the voice of 
David took on the very tone which we hear on the 
lips of Stephen as he sank under the stones, the very 
tone of the voice of our Lord Himself, as His life 
ebbed from Him on the Cross. “ Let me go over 
and cut off that dog’s head,” said Joab. “ No, no,” 
said David, “ let him alone. He is doing me good.” 
The difference in the two expressions had its source 
108 


How what’s in comes out 

in the difference at the moment in the souls of the 
two men. In each case, what was in came out. 

In the New Testament it is a frequent prayer, and 
forms one of the great benedictions, that Christ 
Himself would come and guard the heart and mind 
of those who are seeking to obey Him and to hold 
their ground in this actual world. And again and 
again an Apostle, writing to a group of Christian 
people, especially to those who have just begun 
their Christian life, will urge them to take care of 
their thoughts promising that their actions will 
take care of themselves. And indeed an action is 
just a thought made visible. It is something coming 
out which is in. It is something appearing in light 
which was conceived in the darkness of our person- 
ality. It is something declaring itself from the 
house-tops which we have previously whispered 
in the ear in the inner chambers. And so we may 
even say that every day we live is a day of judgment 
for each of us ; for it is a day of self-revelation. 
We can none of us help giving ourselves away. At 
the Final Judgment it may very well be that there 
will be no need for God to pronounce judgment 
upon us. Standing there we shall betray ourselves. 
And so Francis Thompson has a profound prayer 
that in the Great Assizes God may judge us not with 
our eyes but with His own. 

It is quite true that we have all the power to a 
certain extent to check the tendency of our private 
life to betray itself. We may have sudden impulses 
109 


Our Ambiguous Life 

which we may as suddenly control, driving them 
back into the chambers of our spirit. There are 
many influences round about us which help to keep 
our interior life in check, so that it expresses itself 
as we choose it shall. But it is not a sound con- 
dition for any of us to be in when we have to rely 
upon our own second thoughts, or upon the retri- 
butions of society, to save us from ourselves. Surely 
the only honourable condition for a man to be in 
is that condition in which he has nothing within 
him to conceal, when the deepest and truest thing 
about him is something of such a kind that he 
would not mind the whole world knowing about it. 

We know what a haunted life a man leads whose 
affairs rest upon no honourable and sound basis, 
whose good name in the eyes of the world is depend- 
ent upon the favour of this one and the silence of 
another, so that each day is occupied with plans and 
subterfuges for avoiding detection. That is not 
life at all ; and the great dramas of the world’s liter- 
ature are so many cases to illustrate that rather than 
endure such a condition for more than a season a 
man will prefer to die. Like Ajax, he will ask for 
light, though he perish in the light. 

It is a thing not to be questioned, further, that as 
we get older we lose the power of keeping back the 
true expression of ourselves. As we get older our 
Lord’s words become more and more obviously 
true, that what we have said in the darkness is heard 
in the light, and what we have whispered in the ear 
no 


How what's in comes out 


in the inner chambers, is declared from the house- 
tops. It may be, that as we get older we seem to 
ourselves to be beyond the reach of criticism. 
People, we suppose, have not the power now to harm 
us or to hinder us such as they had when we were 
younger. This may explain how it comes to pass 
that men are apt to break down not when they are 
climbing, but when they have reached the object 
of their ambition. But, quite apart from that, 
it is enough to remember that we all have ourselves 
as we use ourselves. If, in secret, we have been 
sowing to some lower way, later on the miserable 
harvest appears. Happily, the converse is also 
true. If in the days of our sowing, the days of strong 
passion, of ideals, of youth, when our nervous system, 
which is the body of our true spirit, was susceptible 
and creative — if in these days we maintained the 
good fight and contested with the devil every inch 
of space in those inner chambers, then at evening, 
it is promised, there shall be light. 

Now and then we are shocked to learn that 
someone who stood in the general opinion for all 
that was honourable, has suddenly collapsed. Good 
men hearing such things are silent. For a moment 
our own personal security seems to shake. How 
did such a thing happen ? We cannot say. This, 
however, we know, and we must believe it, not 
indeed that we may judge others, but that we may 
stand upon our own guard — an action, however 
hi 


Our Ambiguous Life 

sudden, is never really irrelevant or discontinuous 
to our habitual life. Every action had its secret 
preparation. We judge no man, but we are here to 
judge ourselves ; and the use to which we ought to 
put those tragic failures which are suddenly 
announced, is to see to it that we have no perilous 
stuff lying about the chambers of our soul, such as 
a sudden spark might kindle, overwhelming us in the 
glare. 

The fact is, there are all sorts of things coiled up 
within each of us, and we are not safe until we have 
an absolute Master in the depths of our spirit. 
The only way in which my personal life can be held 
in, deflected, qualified, consecrated, is for me, 
knowing myself, to come into a relationship of love 
and candid fellowship with Another, who I know will 
be wounded by any unworthiness of mine, so that I 
shall be ashamed in my own eyes. 

“ The heart’s aye the part aye that makes us 
right or wrong,” so said Burns. 

“ Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of the 
heart are the issues of life ” so said a Psalmist. 

“ Whatsoever things are pure, true, honourable, 
lovely . . . keep thinking on these things and 

the God of peace shall be with you,” so said an 
Apostle. 

“ Whatsoever ye have said in the darkness shall 
be heard in the light, and what ye have spoken in the 
ear in the inner chambers shall be proclaimed upon 
the housetops,” so said our Lord and Master. 


112 


How what’s in comes out 

Let the deep call unto the deep. 

“ Search me, O God and know my heart ; try me 
and know my thoughts, and see if there be any way 
of wickedness in me, and lead me in the way ever- 
lasting,” so let us say. 


113 

8 


XIV 


44 THOU SHALT KNOW HEREAFTER ” 

No Christian ever claimed that this present life 
justifies itself. This present life we believe is 
justifiable, in the context which Christ gives to it. 
Such seems to be the bearing of some words which 
were amongst the last spoken by Jesus in the inti- 
macy of a small meeting and in that mood of utter 
sincerity which descends upon us face to face with 
the prospect, in fact or in imagination, of death. 
44 What I do thou knowest not now ; but thou 
shalt know hereafter.” These words embody a deep 
truth. Now, a deep and sententious saying about 
life is not something which only learned people or 
expert people can understand. A deep truth is 
always a very simple matter, and easily intelligible. 
For the fact is, what is needed for the understanding 
of any deep saying about life is not that we shall be 
clever or learned ; not that we must have read a 
great many books or have listened to very able people 
discoursing about things. No : what is needed for 
the understanding of any deep saying about life 
is simply that we ourselves have lived, and that we 
have given some attention to what meanwhile has 
been going on in our own minds. For example, 
114 


“Thou shalt know hereafter 


take these words of Jesus. They are very deep 
words ; and yet what they declare is something of 
which every one who has lived and has looked into 
his own mind is already well aware. 

You will agree that this is so, when I recall the 
story. At a certain stage of the Last Supper, our 
Lord somewhat abruptly rose, took a towel and a 
basin and knelt down before each of his guests — to 
wash their feet. Why — in the sense of, with what 
idea in His own mind — He did this, we cannot say. 
It may have been that for Him, and for them alike 
the moment had come when mere words fail ; when 
it becomes too poignant, too harrowing to go on 
speaking — speaking about something which cannot 
now be altered or softened by mere words. It 
may have been that our Lord’s own emotions 
were beginning to be too much for Him ; in fact 
that He stooped down in order to conceal his tears ! 
Such times there are — when words fail. It is well 
for us if at such times we can arise and do something 
with our hands. 

When it came home to the disciples that the 
Master was at their feet, they protested ; and 
Peter spoke for himself and for them all. But our 
Lord appealed to them not to hinder Him and 
appealed to them with this saying : “ What I do 
thou knowest not now but thou shalt know here- 
after.” It is as though he had said : “ A day is 
coming when it may help you, to recall this that I 
am doing to you. At the moment it may seem 
ii5 


Our Ambiguous Life 

little to you ; but time and life will bring out its 
hidden value.” 

That, I say, is a deep truth ; but, I repeat, it is a 
very simple truth. It is something which we all 
learn in the school of life. We are poor judges of 
the value of the things that are happening to us or 
of the things in which we are taking a part — at the 
very moment when they are happening, or when we 
are taking a part. But time and the later necessities 
of life as they beat upon us may cause some little 
thing from earlier days to glow and flash with 
meaning — like a gem in the darkness. 

It is one reason why we should all take our part 
heartily in the days through which we are living — 
that one day we shall frankly need some lesson or the 
memory of some experience which God is offering 
to us precisely now. 

Certainly there is one thing about which we may 
all of us be quite sure. It is this : we shall each of 
us come to need all the faith we have, and all the 
support which can come to us from God through 
our soul. We may be quite sure of that — that life 
shall yet make such demands upon our faith and upon 
our hope and upon our love — so many things will 
yet assail us and tempt us and try to wear us down — 
that it will be well for us not to have evaded any 
experience which later as a memory may fortify 
our soul. 

This, in fact, was the charge which our Lord made 
against the five foolish virgins of the Parables : they 
116 


“Thou shalt know hereafter ” 


had set out upon life forgetful of its later demands. 
If everything had turned out gaily, and according 
to their most [sanguine anticipations, all would have 
been well. They had oil enough for the hour or 
two which they hoped would be all the time they 
should have to wait. But they had nothing in 
reserve. They had no resources if their first 
resources should be exhausted. They had no 
deeper way of looking at life, if their young dream 
should fail. And so they would be left a prey to 
bitterness — to bitterness about life which brings 
such misadventures, or to bitterness about them- 
selves who might have had reserves on which to 
fall back after life’s first blow. 

Now what were the prospects which, we may 
believe, our Lord had in view for those disciples — 
prospects of such a kind that He believed it would 
help them to meet them and pass through them with 
an unbroken spirit, to remember that He had 
stooped down and washed their feet. At heart they 
are the prospects, the inevitable experiences which 
await us all. There is the prospect that one day we 
shall suffer or enter a zone of suffering ; and the 
prospect that face to face with life we shall one day 
lose heart. 

Our Lord was well aware that those who in His 
own day had taken His side and should hold to Him, 
would be called upon to suffer at the hands of the 
ii 7 


Our Ambiguous Life 

world. And so it was. For three hundred years 
indeed off and on, to be a Christian was to run the 
daily risk of a cruel death. And all the time, even 
in the pauses of actual persecution, to be a Christian 
was to be in a minority, was to be living by hopes and 
dreams which the great world despised. Now that 
in itself is to suffer. We can overhear, in the later 
musings of Jesus, His anxiety as to what may happen 
to His followers when He is no longer with them. 
He even says things to certain people who are 
proposing to join His party, with the intention of 
making them hold back. He is always recom- 
mending them to count the cost, to sit down and 
test themselves. At the same time, He welcomes 
those who think that they will be able to bear the 
strain. He cannot give them the kind of gifts 
which the world has at its disposal. He can offer 
them only a task. But with that task He can 
promise them a Holy Companionship, a deep and 
steady greatness of the soul. He can promise them 
in fact what He himself has had. He can convey 
to them the secret of His own blessedness. If 
they continue to love Him, such suffering as they may 
be called upon to bear will never seem too heavy. 
For they will never be called upon to bear more than 
He their Master had to bear. And that He bore 
it all without bitterness they may well believe ; — 
for here on this night in which He is to be betrayed, 
on the eve of sufferings so great that they will be 
taken by mankind for ever as the symbol of all human 
118 


“Thou shalt know hereafter 


suffering — here He is not thinking of Himself, but 
of them, kneeling before them and washing their 
feet. 

That is one prospect, and it seemed to Jesus 
that it would help those disciples on some hard day 
which was coming, to remember this that He had 
done for them. 

There is a second prospect, not unrelated to that 
other. For there is another danger which besets 
all who are seeking to live for Christian ideals in this 
world. From time to time these feel that things 
are too firmly settled, and that the drift against 
themselves and against the things they seek, is all 
too strong. Thereupon they lose heart. It is not 
that they blame anybody. The finer sort in this 
world are almost too apt to blame themselves. 
They feel that if they were better, other people 
would be better and everything would be easier. 
But they lose heart. And I think it was that they 
might not quite lose heart that our Lord stooped 
down and washed their feet. For nothing could 
ever deprive them of that experience. And as they 
recalled it in after days, and amid other scenes, 
that He who through the sheer greatness of His 
Person had become the Lord of Glory, had once 
upon a time, in the crisis and preoccupation of His 
own darkest hour, humbled Himself to wash their 
feet, they might begin to see that that only is true 
greatness, this spirit which endures to the end, 
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Our Ambiguous Life 

which stoops and stoops, never quite evading 
some triumph of this world, yet persisting for the 
love of God. 

Certainly these are among the consequences — 
vague and delicate but having within them the 
strength and subtlety of God — which do come upon 
us as often as we return to the moral majesty of the 
closing hours of our Lord’s earthly life. 

There is no other word for it except to say that 
we are baptized anew into His death, and that we 
rise from the dead into newness of life. 


120 


XV 


S. PAUL’S DECISION IN A CRISIS 

Long ago, in my student days, a man of my year, 
now held in great honour in all the Churches, told 
me this story. One day, in the University of 
Marburg, the privat-docent, or tutor, as we 
should call him, was lecturing to his class on 
“ Paul.” He must have belonged to the naturalist 
or rationalist side of German theology. His quite 
deliberate intention was to emasculate the whole 
story of S. Paul, to clear away what he would have 
regarded as the nimbus of myth and perversion 
which had gathered round the Apostle’s personality, 
and to make of Paul — well, I hardly know what he 
supposed he could make of Paul having deprived 
Paul of everything that made him Paul. But my 
friend of those old days told me that one day, when 
his tutor was labouring at his business, reading from 
his manuscript, and was dealing with the life of Paul 
as he could not but see that life in those Corinthian 
Epistles, he suddenly left his manuscript, and lifting 
up his eyes to his class he said, “ Nevertheless, 
gentlemen, this Paul was a great fellow.” 

I can recall, too, how in John Morley’s book on 
Compromise , written as it was in Morley’s early and 
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Our Ambiguous Life 

most negative, and from some points of view very 
crude period, he also, pondering this mighty and 
vivid personality who alone at the outset saw the 
intention of Christ, breaks through the fetters of 
his own mind, and declares that the world is 
waiting for another God-intoxicated man like Saul 
of Tarsus. 

It is a pity that S. Paul should be thought of, by 
most people who think much about serious things, as 
above everything else a theologian. The fact is, 
S. Paul was first and last and all the time a great man. 
That he was a theologian is part of his greatness. 
No man can be a great man who is not a theologian. 
That is to say, no man can be a great man whose 
activities do not rest upon some conviction with 
regard to the ultimate meaning of life. We shall 
never be great if we allow ourselves to suppose 
that we are the creatures of a day. If life is ulti- 
mately a trifling thing, a man may become dex- 
terous in his manipulation of himself or other people, 
he may become clever, and, because he has no deep 
attachment, he may be interesting and various ; 
but a great man he cannot be ; for what makes great- 
ness ultimately is loyalty, and there is no loyalty 
where there is not the vision and perception of 
something which alone gives to life its meaning. 

It is a thing not to be wondered at that S. Paul is 
the standby of all missionaries and ministers and 
evangelists whose hearts remain alive to their great 
responsibilities and opportunities in the world. 

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S. Paul's Decision in a Crisis 

And there is no study which I should so recommend, 
not only to missionaries and ministers and evangelists 
but to every man who in this world is contending 
for ideal things in Church or state, as a daily 
baptism of their spirits in the spirit of S. Paul. He 
knows all about us in those times when we 
lose heart, when the world seems too old to learn 
anything really new ; but he knows us also in those 
hours that come to every faithful man when some- 
thing which S. Paul calls the Glory of God in the face 
of Jesus Christ, breaks upon us, when a great happi- 
ness descends upon our hearts and we become soft 
and tender and grateful, and when we say with our 
Master, “ Father, I thank Thee that I have known 
Thee ” — meaning, “ We would rather go on con- 
tending for these ideal things, no matter what 
bufferings they entail, than lose from our souls the 
faith which Christ kindled in them, a faith so 
momentous that could we imagine it to be finally 
false, it would be for us as though the sun had 
turned into blood.” 

As we get on in life, we ought to be getting to 
know ourselves, and getting to know how to deal 
with ourselves in various moods. We ought all to 
know how best to recover ourselves from wrong 
inclinations or from brooding upon aspects of life 
which only dishearten and disable us. For myself, 
there is no medicine which acts so swiftly upon my 
soul as to read deeply, though it may be only briefly, 
in a self-revealing page of S. Paul. Father Damien, 
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Our Ambiguous Life 

in the South Seas — you will remember the story — 
one day let some boiling water fall upon his foot, 
and to his horror he felt no pain. He knew that it 
meant that already his foot had become leprous : 
that to feel no pain when one ought to feel pain, 
is, so far, to be dead. I hope I shall always decide 
if I can ever read an Epistle of S. Paul without 
having my own self-love rebuked and any morbid- 
ness or dissatisfaction or petulance instantly 
challenged and put to shame, that something as 
deadly as leprosy has taken possession of my soul. 

In the eleventh chapter of the Second Epistle to 
the Corinthians, S. Paul, stung by the reproaches of 
his enemies, pours out his heart. It is a chapter 
which makes every good man ashamed. For, really, 
when we come to look at things beneath the surface, 
we see that we have just as good a right to live 
strenuous and believing lives as S. Paul had. The 
only reason why he lived that kind of life and bore 
those things, was that he was a Christian man, and 
it seemed to him the thing to do. And 
we are Christians, and though I do not want to say 
anything so unreal as that we ought to copy the whole 
of S. Paul’s experience, I do want to say that there 
ought to be something in our experience who are 
Christians which can quite honestly be compared 
as being of the same spirit as his experience. I 
have no right to praise high action on the part of 
any one unless I mean that it was the kind of thing 
that I myself should have loved to do. When I 
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S. Paul’s Decision in a Crisis 


praise one who leaps into the water to save a child, 
what I mean is, to thank God that there are men 
like him, and to declare that had I been there, where 
he was, I should have behaved in the emergency as 
he behaved, even though, since I cannot swim, I 
might have been drowned. 

Well, now, just look for a moment at those words 
of S. Paul, in the sixteenth chapter of that Epistle, 
in which he announces a decision. He has been 
invited, it would appear, to visit and to labour in 
some other field, he meanwhile being at Ephesus. If 
you turn to the Book of the Acts and read the story of 
the uproar in Ephesus, you will conclude that S. Paul 
might have welcomed the invitation to go anywhere 
out of the way. The uproar in Ephesus is to me one 
of the greatest proofs that Jesus Christ our Lord 
had indeed risen from the dead. For there we see 
something grappling with things-as-they-are in 
the name of things-as-they-should-be. There are 
times when we think of quietness and calm as the 
tokens of the Presence of the Lord ; and in heaven 
so it may be. There are moments, too, definite 
spaces of our human experience, when God gives to 
us an honourable interval of sheer peace ; but for the 
most part Christianity is a state of war and the 
sign of its presence is something of the nature of 
an uproar in the world. 

“ I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, 
unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out 
and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race 

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Our Ambiguous Life 

where that immortal garland is to be run for, not 
without dust and heat.” 

I say, it might have seemed an attractive 
thing to the Apostle to get away from a place of 
such contention and anger, where the powerful 
local interests were all against Christ, and where 
those interests would fight with every weapon, clean 
and unclean, rather than budge an inch. But the 
good man, with a simplicity which makes us aware 
by contrast of our more complicated souls, sees his 
way quite clearly. “ I shall tarry at Ephesus until 
Pentecost, for an open door stands before me 
demanding great efforts, and we have many adver- 
saries.” “ I shall stay where I am, till something 
fine happens from the side of God, because here I 
have work to do which will tax all my powers and 
there are evil things here to be withstood in the 
Name of Christ.” 

It is a very great happiness which descends upon 
a man when he sees his way quite clearly, and 
especially when he sees that his way is not an easy 
way and yet that he is ready and even eager to take 
it. It is a very great happiness for a man quite 
honestly to discover within himself that he is not 
tired, that he is not afraid, when he sees with fresh 
eyes that his business in the world is not to look after 
himself and to secure his own quiet future, but to 
put himself at the disposal of his Lord and Master, 
leaving it to Him to make of him what use He can. 
In the mind of the Apostle there is no conflict 
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S. Paul’s Decision in a Crisis 

between the idea on the one hand that he had an 
open door where he was, and the idea on the other 
hand that the place was full of difficulties. Indeed, 
it is most probable that it was the presence of the 
difficulties that constituted for S. Paul the open door. 
We know that S. Paul on another occasion refused to 
go into a certain place because of certain difficulties, 
I mean when he refused to go into Bithynia, but that 
was not because there were dangers there or hazards. 
It was because, as he puts it, he was forbidden of the 
Spirit to go in. In our own modern speech, we 
should not be far wrong in translating that and 
saying that, in the case of Bithynia, S. Paul felt 
that he must not go there because somehow or 
other his heart was not in it ; his heart, his whole 
being, somehow turned against going into Bithynia, 
and so he did not go there. But he stayed at 
Ephesus because his heart was with him in staying. 
There were difficulties he knew. Of course there 
were difficulties ! There would have been no need 
for him there if there had been no difficulties. 
There was the old worship of Diana. The whole 
town rested for its prosperity upon a wrong basis. 
Therefore, the Apostle decided that that was the 
place God meant him to work in ; at any rate, he 
decided that he would tarry there until Pentecost. 
Perhaps I am putting a slight stress upon that 
phrase, but it is pardonable if I interpret S. Paul’s 
words and say of him that he resolved to tarry at 
Ephesus until some fine thing happened from the 
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Our Ambiguous Life 

side of God, until the mind of Christ was well 
settled in the place ; so that when he had to leave 
it, as one day of course he did leave it, he could 
comfort himself knowing that he had left behind 
him on the altar of the Church at Ephesus a fire 
that would never die. 


128 


XVI 


“STRENGTH MADE PERFECT IN 
WEAKNESS ” 

When we speak of a man who is weak being at the 
same time strong, we must mean of course that the 
weakness and the strength are on different levels of 
his nature. A man may be weak in body but strong 
mentally : or he may be only a moderately able man 
from the intellectual point of view, and at the same 
time may be a man of strong and beautiful character 
— a good man, in short. And that is what this saying 
of S. Paul’s affirms. What S. Paul declares is that 
a man may have a region in his life in which he is 
weak, and yet may turn that very weakness into an 
opportunity for becoming eminent in some other 
region. 

We have the saying that every man has his weak- 
ness. A very proper saying it is, because it has the 
tone of charity ; though we must take care not to 
regard such a saying as a defence of our weakness, so 
that in a subtle way we even may become proud of 
it. The real victory of life is when, starting from 
a specific weakness, we attain to a general or specific 
distinction in talent or character. 


129 


Our Ambiguous Life 

S. Paul, who, being a preacher, got to know every- 
thing about the human soul — about his own soul 
and other people’s souls — speaks of “ a sin that doth 
so easily beset us.” That is to say, we have each of 
us our weak point, and round about that weak point 
a man’s personal battle wages. That battle may 
go on until the man dies, but even so we need not 
adopt a sad tone about it. Nothing makes life 
more interesting than the fact that it is a good 
fight. There is nobody in the world who ought to 
be able to say that he or she has nothing to do, for 
we have something to do so long as we have some- 
thing to overcome. We have something to do so 
long as we may become better than we are. And 
if there are any people in the world who think they 
are as good as is possible, they must be very lonely 
and must wish at times they were not quite so perfect. 
Life puts each one of us to the test, not over a wide 
field of duties and responsibilities, but for the most 
part over a few, or — even more likely — over one. 
There are a hundred demands which we easily meet 
as moral beings ; but there may be one or 
two points in behaviour known to ourselves where 
we fail. It is over those one or two points that a 
man has to wage what we might call the fight 
of his life. If he wins there he wins all along 
the line. If he loses there the enemy gets round 
his flanks. 

It sometimes seems as though all we are going 
to get out of the war are some illustrations. 

130 


Strength made Perfect in Weakness 

Looking back one remembers that this was how in 
its later stages progress was made on one side or the 
other. We formed a salient, a projecting point. 
Then elsewhere, though not too far away, we 
formed another salient. Our task was to defend 
those points that projected into the enemy’s lines 
until we could make them meet. The enemy’s task 
was to drive in those points, or outflank us as we 
held them. 

We may take a lesson for our own personal 
life from such a recollection. There are whole 
tracts of our life that are not seriously threatened, 
that are not indeed actually in contact with the 
enemy. We come into contact with him only at 
points ; and these points, full of peril as they are, 
supply us with the very basis and material for 
victory. 

The danger of course is — to revert to the purely 
personal matter — that a man takes credit to himself 
for holding his own along a line, and does not blame 
himself too severely for the loss here and there of 
some projecting point ; forgetting, once again, 
that it was only at the projecting point he 
was in touch with the enemy. In fact, a man 
must take care not to take credit to himself for 
not failing on a hundred points for which he has 
no mind, if he fails on a point or two to which he is 
inclined. 

On the other hand the Stoics, who knew a great 
deal about the human soul, almost everything, 

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Our Ambiguous Life 

declared that a man who has one virtue, soundly 
and thoroughly, has really all the virtues. 

To put all that again : there are some weaknesses, 
excesses, to which we are really not tempted. 
Our attitude to those things has no significance at 
all. Indeed, if we do not take care we may find 
ourselves becoming proud that we do not fail where 
the fact is we are not on trial. But there are one 
or two things on which, it may be, we know we are 
threatened ; and it is with regard to these that we 
stand or fall as moral beings. 

If there was any man who had the right to talk 
about weakness and about gaining the victory over 
weakness, it was S. Paul. He himself is very reticent, 
like the very brave man he was ; but reading between 
the lines, we learn that he was what we should call 
a delicate man. It may have been a weakness of the 
eyes as some declare ; it may have been epilepsy, 
that malady of genius : but, whatever it was, he had 
something which, in the case of many of us, would 
have seemed to give reason enough for us doing 
nothing in the world but feeling our own pulse, 
so to speak. Instead of that, Paul did in the 
world a piece of work which ought to make all 
of us ashamed. In the Second Epistle to the 
Corinthians he takes the veil from his reticence for a 
little while, and permits us to look upon a man 
burdened and sensitive and quivering, on the edge 
of a total collapse, but swinging back from that edge 
into a life of incredible fruitfulness. And he tells 


132 


Strength made Perfect in Weakness 

us in this very passage that in the depth of that 
dark night, when his soul touched bottom in its 
misgivings and despairs, suddenly a star appeared 
for him over the horizon of the blackness, and he 
heard what he declares was the voice of God, saying 
“ My strength is made perfect in weakness.” 

Now history is full of illustrations and corrobor- 
ations of this profound insight and experience of the 
Apostle. So true is it indeed that weakness becomes 
the condition of strength, that it is also true that 
there is no strength which does not rest upon an 
accepted and consciously felt weakness, when a man 
appeals to God and to certain unexplored resources 
of the spirit, through his very weakness. 

We all of us know something of the history of a 
pearl ; how a pearl is the contrivance of life to heal 
a wound within the shell. The shell is wounded, 
whereupon mysterious forces rush to the threatened 
point, as the blood corpuscles rush to isolate some 
poison that has broken through our skin ; mysterious 
forces gather in round about the speck of sand 
that has lodged in the softness within the shell ; 
and that wound and that intruding sand and that 
hurrying resource of life, these together, make the 
beauty and the mystery of a pearl. 

Some fifty years ago, a celebrated man of letters, 
W. R. Greg, wrote a book entitled Lhe Enigmas of 
Life . A sad, true book it was and is, and this is the 
thesis : that no man is literally worth his salt unless, 
so to speak, there is something wrong with him. If 
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Our Ambiguous Life 

there is nothing obviously wrong with him, the only 
hope for him is to undertake so much in life that he 
shall soon or late become aware of some deep neces- 
sity, and out of that necessity may cry out and find 
God. But W. R. Greg’s position, when one accepts 
it as cheerfully as may be, was that only when we are 
weak, weak somewhere, have we any hope towards 
God ; that to have everything is to be lost ; that to 
have everything is to have no open door into the 
infinite, no window open towards Jerusalem : that 
to have everything is confessedly to have no place 
for God. And so it has come about that the sufferers 
in this world have been the great consolers. 
The great ones of the earth have been poor or 
stricken in body, or flung into social or domestic 
sorrows that have tortured their souls into genius ; 
or, having no great sorrows of their own, they have 
taken upon themselves, as our Saviour did, the sins 
and sorrows of mankind. 

Raleigh wrote The History of the World in the 
Tower of London ; Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim's 
Progress in Bedford Gaol ; John Addington Symonds 
wrote his seven volumes on the Renaissance when 
seeking safety from consumption in Switzerland. 
Stevenson’s whole message to mankind is a call 
to us to be brave though our days are numbered ; 
to stand up to the insinuating faces of decay and 
death. And Demosthenes became Demosthenes 
literally because, to begin with, he stammered in 
his speech. 


134 


Strength made Perfect in Weakness 

Sometimes we wish we had lived in a different kind 
of world, a world where everything should be 
convenient and smooth and tame. But God, who 
knows us better than we know ourselves, persists 
in refusing to give us such a world. Were we to 
live in such a world, we should become sheep or 
vegetables ; and if a man is much better than a 
sheep, he is infinitely better than a vegetable. And 
yet, we have our moments when we yearn for the 
dull placidity of the one or of the other. We have, 
thank God, other moments when we are ashamed of 
such apostasy from the great human enterprise. For 
it is because of our inevitable limitations, and 
because of what we are, that we have built all the 
characteristic things that embody human greatness. 
It is because of our limitations and because 
we are just what we are, weak, tried, subject 
to moods, to reactions of fear and recoveries of faith, 
that we have music and poetry and art and the 
faculty of prayer. What are these — this character- 
istic life of man — what are they, but the beat of the 
wings of our spirit against mortal limitations and 
innuendoes ? What is man’s essential life but this 
inveterate protest against limitation, against mor- 
tality ? What is it but the undying soul of man 
claiming God and eternity, having seen these through 
his prison bars ? “ There is no disinterested know- 

ledge of God,” said Luther. There is, that is to say, 
no impartial knowledge of God. There is no un- 
prejudiced interpretation of life. There is no 
i35 


Our Ambiguous Life 

unconditioned loyalty of the soul. The only know- 
ledge of God which comes to us one by one is that 
personal assistance and encouragement which He 
gives us when out of some confessed weakness or 
failure or necessity we lift up our hearts to Him. 


136 


XVII 


FAITH THE REFUGE FROM ANXIETY 

“ Be careful for nothing.” So S. Paul writes — from 
a prison ! It is strange to us that he could write 
at all, strange that he could detach himself from his 
own cares and fears, that he could think away from 
himself so as to take upon his heart the cares and 
troubles of others. And still more wonderful to 
our natural expectation is it that when he did bring 
himself to think of others, he should be able to hide 
entirely his own condition at the time. You would 
never know that the man who is speaking is himself 
at the moment in sore straits. You feel indeed 
that he is a man who has at some time in his life 
been in trouble ; he knows so well the language of 
the troubled heart, and knows the deep cure for 
care. We should say — even if we know nothing 
more of Paul — that he had been in distress ; but 
we should suppose that his troubles were long since 
past and that at the moment he was enjoying the 
fruits of his suffering, and speaking out of the fulness 
of his memory. 

For there is no distress in his words, nothing to 
indicate that his own future at the time was full of 
danger. There is, on the^contrary, a most wonder- 
ful sense of peace, and of superiority over the world. 

137 


Our Ambiguous Life 

Now, we could understand why the Apostle — 
though he had troubles of his own — set himself to 
write to the Philippians, and how it was that he 
forgot his own troubles as he thought of them ; we 
could understand these things, I say, if we could 
believe that the Philippians were enduring some 
heavier burden than his own. For we ourselves 
knowhow — unless we are selfish to an alarming degree 
— we lose our own troubles when we stand before 
another who, as we see, has still more to bear than 
we. We must all of us know the kind of experience 
I am meaning, when we are ashamed that we ever 
complain as we become aware of the sorer burdens 
which many of our brethren and neighbours bear. 
How our secret complaints and grudges die away 
within us when we come face to face with others 
who have things to endure alongside which we hate 
to think of what we allowed to trouble us ! 

But that was not the situation when the Apostle 
wrote. His was the harder lot. Compared with 
his condition, the Philippians were at ease. There 
was indeed a dispute amongst the members ; but 
this only proves that they were not in any real 
trouble, that their hearts were not heavy with 
sorrow. 

It was, therefore, the one who was suffering most 
who felt most surely the peace of God. When they 
were all of them in troubles, it was he who had the 
heaviest burden who alone was quiet enough to 
offer help and sympathy to the others. 

138 


Faith the Refuge from Anxiety 

This we say is strange, and it is to be explained 
only by a spiritual law. We should expect that those 
who suffer least in this world would be the most 
hopeful, would be the most firmly persuaded of the 
goodness of God and of the high promise in things. 
And yet it is not so. It is nearer the truth to say 
that those who suffer most in this world are most 
persuaded of life’s profound and holy meaning 
and of the real superintendence of God. And 
certain it is that those who suffer in some deep and 
utter way have usually a surer faith and a sweeter 
spirit than others whom suffering has touched lightly, 
ruffling the skin and surface of their life, not reaching 
to their very heart, making it bleed. Thus it comes 
to pass that one who is enduring some great sorrow 
— so heavy and intimate that it can only be borne 
by the help of God through ceaseless prayer — is 
able to minister comfort to another who is only 
fretted it may be by worldly cares, and troubled in 
a shallow way. For suffering does nothing for us, 
and gives us nothing, until it takes us direct to God. 

We shall see this more clearly — how suffering, 
the deeper it reaches, reveals the more of God and 
of the truth to us — if we take a case. Take the case 
of a man whom God is dealing with by the events of 
his life, as God indeed is dealing with us all. This 
man, let us suppose, meets a loss in his worldly 
affairs. If he is a religious man, perhaps the loss 
brought a spiritual gain ; perhaps it had just that 
secret steadying influence which was becoming 
139 


Our Ambiguous Life 

necessary ; perhaps for a moment it caused a fear 
to pass through his mind, leaving him a better man. 
That loss or check upon his prosperity reminded 
him that much of every life is beyond our control ; 
that God has indeed the disposing of the lot. 

But if the man to whom this loss has come omits 
to take this private instruction to himself, the 
reverse will do him harm as a man. It will only 
make him closer, harder, and anxious now to recover 
his ground. We are supposing for the moment that 
the loss or reverse was not so serious as to over- 
whelm the man, but just enough to mean some- 
thing to him if he was a sensitive and religious man, 
and to irritate him if he were a mere man of the 
world. 

But now let us suppose that the loss in the way of 
fortune and prospects which one has incurred is a 
very serious matter, so serious as practically to ruin 
the man in a worldly way. Is it not very frequently 
the case — so frequently as to give us the hint that the 
thing happens not by chance but in obedience to a 
gracious law — that a man behaves with a certain 
dignity and self-restraint in a day of real disaster 
who would have become merely angry and mean- 
spirited under one small reverse ? The fact is that 
troubles the more deeply they affect us have the 
greater chance of doing us good. 

And now let us suppose this man who has 
been overwhelmed in worldly difficulties, to be 
visited by a still deeper sorrow. Let us suppose 

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Faith the Refuge from Anxiety 

that just when his affairs are most embarrassed, 
the shadow of death falls upon his home. The life 
of one most dear to him is threatened, and he has 
to pass through days and nights of intolerable 
suspense. You would say that that would be an 
added burden, a new load of sorrow. But really 
it is not. It is rather the case that this new and 
deeper sorrow liberates the man from his earlier 
vexations. And this is how God often sets us free 
from our cares — not by removing our causes for 
care, but by sending us some deeper concern in 
whose intenser shadow our unworthy complainings 
hide themselves. For we cease to complain when 
we need to pray. We do not complain when life — 
which is in great part God — has forced us to our 
knees. 

Imagine such an one in such an hour — one, I 
mean, who is sitting waiting while some one most 
dear to him is hovering between life and death — 
being consulted by a friend far away on some point 
of business or worldly prudence ! How unreal 
all such questions would appear to him at such a 
time ; how paltry all such fears and anxieties to 
him who was undergoing a severer strain ! How 
naturally — and it would be without any affectation — 
he might write back to his friend : “ Do not let 
these things eat up your heart : have no anxiety 
about them. We should only be anxious about one 
thing and it, whether we are ready to suffer accord- 
ing to the Will of God.” Thus, although it seems 
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Our Ambiguous Life 

strange to people who do not know the deeper 
movements of the soul, it is in keeping with a 
spiritual law, a law of compensation by which the 
inward may always be able to counterbalance the 
outward, that the Apostle — who had most to bear — 
was able to write to those who were only a little 
troubled and to tell them out of his own heart, 
how men may rise above their cares — forgetting 
them in some deeper entreaty of the Spirit. 
“ Entertain no anxious cares,” he wrote, “ but throw 
them all upon God. By your prayer and your 
supplication make your every want known to Him. 
If you do this, then the peace of God, far more 
effective than any forethought or contrivance of 
man (that passeth all understanding), will keep watch 
over your hearts and your thoughts in Jesus 
Christ.” 

And now let us consider the Apostle’s counsel 
on this matter, carefully and in detail. 

“ In nothing be anxious, but in everything let 
out your hearts to God.” “ In nothing be anxious.” 
Had the Apostle said no more than that, his words 
would have been of no value to us. A man has no 
right to say to another “ Do not be anxious ” ; 
unless he can say more, unless indeed he can speak of 
God. If anxiety could be removed at a mere word, 
there would be no anxiety in the world. For 
none know better than the care-worn, how good it 
would be to have no care. What the Apostle does 
here is to offer — like a physician of the soul — a 
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Faith the Refuge from Anxiety 

certain treatment for a harassed and anxious mind. 

Underlying this counsel, you can feel that, accord- 
ing to the Apostle, anxiety arises and is possible to us 
because our heart is in a certain condition. We 
sometimes speak as though anxiety were the result of 
our circumstances, and were inevitable. But in truth 
it is not so : as we shall admit if we consider only 
this, which will not be disputed by any one — that 
things which one day have brought anxiety to us, 
have at some other time, when we ourselves were 
nearer to God, brought only a deeper faith and a 
quieter spirit. Anxiety is not the effect of our 
circumstances upon us ; it is rather our way of look- 
ing at our circumstances. Anxiety is a spirit, a mood, 
a state of heart, and we are free from it only when the 
good spirit, which is its opposite, occupies us. The 
Spirit of Anxiety has its contradiction and overthrow 
in the Spirit of Faith. The habit of anxiety has for 
its contrary the habit of prayer. 

Think of anxiety, and what do you find it to be ? 
What is its essence, and what is the thought at the 
heart of anxiety of whatever kind it may be ? Is it 
not the spirit of unbelief ? Why is anyone anxious 
and when ? Is it not because there is a region of 
possibilities outside of him over which he has no 
control yet from which he is afraid that evils may 
come ? Now is the essence of such a mood not 
simply the spirit of unbelief ? Are you not — in 
your anxiety — acting and feeling as if that region of 
possibilities over which you have no control, were in 
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Our Ambiguous Life 

the hands of no one , and least of all in the hands of 
Eternal Justice and Love ? Yes : the spirit and 
heart of anxiety is the denial for the time being, or 
the forgetting, of God. Therefore the cure — our 
deliverance — comes with calling Him to our remem- 
brance, that is with prayer. What does one wish 
when one is harassed and anxious but to feel that he 
and all that is really of value to him are in good hands 
for they are in God’s hands ? And how can that 
feeling come to me and stay with me— when things 
seem contrary in the world and in my lot — except 
by drawing near to God in Jesus Christ, and be- 
thinking myself that He who spared not His Son 
but freely gave Him up for us all, will not fail us in 
our day of need, or if He seem to fail us, it is that 
He is preparing for us some greater good, and pre- 
paring us to receive it. 

The words of the Apostle in the context do more 
than merely recommend prayer as the way of 
deliverance from the strains and harassings of life 
and of our own hearts. They describe — those words 
of his — the stages through which an anxious heart 
passes as it leaves its troubles behind in prayer 
and settles at last into the peace of God. Each 
word of that sentence — prayer, supplication, thanks- 
giving, requests — each of these words marks another 
movement in the deepening communion with God. 
Each word marks a stage in the cure and recovery of 
a troubled spirit. 

Suppose that one of those Philippians, instead of 
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Faith the Refuge from Anxiety 

receiving a letter from the Apostle, had met him, 
and that the Apostle had given him this counsel 
by word of mouth. It would have been somewhat 
as follows ; for I shall simply paraphrase and expand 
what Paul has written here. When anxiety like a 
wave comes over you (so he would have said, for 
so indeed he says), and threatens to paralyse your 
life, do not argue against your mood. The first thing 
you must do is to think as earnestly as you can upon 
God. Remind yourself that concerning the deep 
and real things, you have — if you will — a Friend in 
God. Hold hard by that thought, for it strikes a 
silence through the troubled soul and gives one 
leisure to think and to recover hope. (That is what 
the Apostle means in the words “ by prayer ” — 
“ in everything by prayer.” He means the approach 
of the soul to God, the spirit of trust coming over 
one. Let your life go out to God.) When you have 
done this, we imagining him continuing, you will 
be conscious that you have already lost most of 
your anxieties. You will find that many things 
do not trouble you now that you are in spirit near 
to God. Indeed, if you open your lips it will be 
not to ask anything, but to give thanks : to give thanks 
that you have One to speak to, One to lean upon. 
For when we are most in earnest, we do not wish God 
to fill our empty hands, but rather to hold them. 

And now, says the Apostle, when your heart has 
grown quiet under the shadow of the Almighty, when 
you are now disposed to ask nothing from God 
145 


10 


Our Ambiguous Life 

except what God moves you to ask, now , make your 
requests ( amj/xaTo ) known unto him. Pour out 
your heart : keep nothing back ; for it was that 
that made the misery of your anxiety — you never 
could utter it all and so relieve your soul. For the 
reason that anxiety so disables us and paralyses us, is 
that it closes our heart against God. In the heat 
and planning and confusion of an anxious mind, 
God is forgotten and such comfort as always comes 
when we look away from ourselves. Whereas prayer 
is the entrance of God into our hearts, whose first 
work in a troubled soul is to bring in orderliness and 
quiet. “ The peace of God which passeth under- 
standing ” — the peace of God which is better than any 
security which we may seem to have brought to our- 
selves by our own planning and contrivance . The 
peace of a surrendered soul, which is better than the 
peace which we try to make for ourselves by 
arranging our circumstances to our liking : this 
seems to be the meaning of the phrase “ the peace of 
God that passeth all understanding ” as used here. 

Observe one thing more, though it is not new to 
those who know the Scriptures or who have had any 
real human experience. S. Paul does not promise 
here that prayer will alter the facts of our life. He 
does not say that in every case the harassing thing 
will pass away. What he does promise, and this 
never fails, is that true prayer will give any of us 
new heart for our life, courage to meet our peculiar 
trials, patience under its checks and crosses, and 
146 


Faith the Refuge from Anxiety 

recovery from its most cruel disasters. That the 
power of God is ours in prayer. What he does 
promise — and surely we desire nothing more mean- 
while — is, that the things which formerly harassed 
our minds will cease to harass us if we draw near to 
God in Christ Jesus : that what formerly made us 
anxious will henceforth make us pray. 

What we want in our sorest hours is to have Some 
One to speak to who knows all that is troubling 
us ; that, and this too — that the Great Wise and 
Loving God, the Eternal Christ, is in all and through 
all and over all. 


XVIII 


“ TAKE THY SHARE OF HARDNESS ” 

It is a strange circumstance — that strong brave words 
like these are to be found only in times of hard- 
ship, and that they always come from the lips of 
some one who has suffered bitterly. One would 
have supposed that when men were at their ease, 
sitting by their firesides (so to speak) none making 
them afraid, then would have been the time for them 
to feel heroic, and to utter noble words. That 
when their strength had gathered through long 
ease, when they had suffered no aches of body or 
agonies of the mind, they would have had courage 
and all the manly virtues lying idle and eager to 
prove themselves on some hard battle-field. But 
it is not so. An easy age is a soft age, and cannot 
use strong words with any sincerity. We can never 
have courage lying idle and ready to be used upon 
occasion. A man’s courage is not ready for use 
unless he is using it now — using it, it may be, in 
some private way, for example, in resisting temp- 
tations or in taking up unpleasant duties, and so 
mastering himself ; but he must be exercising him- 
self in courage in some real way, otherwise he has 
none of it. The fact is, that in the matter of 
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“Take thy share of hardness” 


personal qualities and endowments, we have only 
what we are using . We have no courage until we 
act courageously. We have no power of endurance 
until we are actually enduring something. We have 
no reserves until they are called out. We have no 
further resources until our regular and usual defence 
has been overwhelmed. We know ourselves only 
in the fire. When we are weak then are we strong. 

A man’s real strength or weakness, the light in 
his eyes, the tone of his voice — his actual worth and 
moral weight at the moment is a private matter 
and depends upon things which only the man him- 
self knows. But this is true of all : it is only when 
we ourselves are severally engaged meeting and 
overthrowing our private enemies, that we can speak 
or will care to speak to a brother man bidding him 
be brave and strong. When a man is at ease con- 
cerning his own moral life, not repelling the enemy 
on the threshold, but allowing base and inferior 
things to dim his vision of duty and of God ; when 
as the result of such indolence, a man’s own life has 
grown soft and yielding, he is no more at home with, 
but is in truth afraid of, any strong word such as 
bids men endure hardness and fight the good fight, 
and cut off a hand or pluck out an eye for the sake 
of the soul’s integrity, for the sake of the Kingdom 
of God. 

One who is himself secretly unfaithful or irregular 
in his obedience, begins to take a melancholy view 
of the prospects of holiness in this world. He 
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Our Ambiguous Life 

becomes oppressed with the mystery and magni- 
tude of sin, instead of being inspired with the 
mystery of Godliness and the magnitude of our 
resources in God. Such an one — one who is him- 
self giving way — has, for the time being, lost all 
taste for those sterner, grander words, which bring 
iron into the soul, and scatter the gloom, and put 
the world under our feet. 

This is all to say that you find always the hard 
heroic words in hard heroic days and you find them 
on the lips of those who are hard pressed and suffer- 
ing. For example, here. S. Paul, when he wrote 
these words — “ Thou therefore take thy share of the 
hardness like a good soldier of Jesus Christ ” — was 
himself a prisoner of Jesus Christ in Rome. The 
persecution under Nero was at its height — a perse- 
cution in which the Apostle was destined to meet 
his death. From beneath such a shadow, and 
with a brave, unflinching, indomitable spirit, he 
hails his brother-soldier in another part of the field : 
“ Stand fast,” “ be brave.” 

Timothy was a young man : his health poor : 
in temperament, as it seems, affectionate and sen- 
sitive. He was one of those who are more ready 
than others to give way in the midst of their work. 
Besides, Timothy was a minister of the Church. 
The Apostle therefore writes to him with almost 
this single aim, to put heart into the young servant 
of Christ. Paul knows very well how a man may 
become depressed as he feels his own solitariness 
150 


“Take thy share of hardness 


and looks out upon the world where so many are 
content to live in ignorance and disregard of God. 
He knows how his young son in the faith, if he is 
speaking out the words which God gives him, will 
be provoking dislike and estrangement amongst 
his hearers, and the hostility of all whom he rebukes ; 
so that his position will become more and more 
lonely. He knows, too — for has he not felt the same 
and cried out of the darkness ? — how, more than 
others, a highly-strung nervous man, who has no 
great fund of health, is liable to sudden fits of gloom 
when the battle seems quite lost. 

Therefore with all delicacy, yet with plainness 
of speech, he seeks to fortify the soul of Timothy 
against his besieging circumstances. “ Be strong,” 
he says, “ sit loosely to the world, avoid all entangle- 
ments that mortgage your power or your inde- 
pendence, say out your word, strike your blow, 
behave like a soldier who has had his orders.” 

Those words of Paul to Timothy have an added 
pathos when we remember that they were among! 
the last words of the great Apostle. And who 
knows but Paul, as he penned them, may have 
surmised that they might easily be his last ! We 
know that natures like his — keen, sensitive — have a 
wonderful delicacy of perception, the power, as it 
often seems, to foresee what is coming to them. 
Things which happen to others, and have no meaning 
for them, have the power to suggest events, to awaken 
forebodings in these finer souls. 

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Our Ambiguous Life 

We may believe that Paul suspected that he would 
soon be taken away. This meant that Timothy 
would be left alone as he had never been before. 
Therefore the Apostle writes to him to encourage 
him in his work, reminding him that his calling as a 
servant of Christ is to endure. 

Just as our Lord prepared His disciples for the 
days when He should be no more with them, so 
Paul hinted to his young son in the faith that a 
deeper loneliness was about to come to him, and that 
he must meet it bravely. He told him before it was 
come to pass that when it should come to pass he 
might be ready. So much regarding the circum- 
stances in which these words were spoken. 

And now, to speak of the words themselves. 
“Thou therefore take thy share of hardness like a 
good soldier of Jesus Christ.” 

It may seem to some of us — and there are 
moods when it will seem to all of us — -that this com- 
mand “ take thy share of hardness ” is too strong 
and, one might even say, unsympathetic. We could 
have wished that the Apostle had added some 
consolation ; for example, had he hinted that the 
hardness would soon pass and things would become 
easier. Or he might have gone on to explain that 
hardness is God’s discipline of us all, that whom the 
Lord loveth He chasteneth — thus lighting up 
Timothy’s difficulties by showing him God’s in- 
tention. Some such an addition as that to his 
short brusque command would, we think, have 
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“Take thy share of hardness 


improved it and given comfort and endurance to 
Timothy. 

But that is just our mistake. The fact is, that 
nothing brings such composure to the human soul 
in all its most real hours, as to hear an unqualified 
command. Most of our misery arises from doubt. 
We are so made that we are happy and at peace only 
when we are under orders. We are wretched 
usually because we are undecided. Are we at our 
proper work ? Have we found our place in the 
world ? Ought we to bear certain things which 
are lying heavily upon us, or should we cast 
them off if we can ? Should we hold on, or should 
we give up the struggle ? These, I am sure, are the 
things which vex us and harass us, and divide our 
soul against itself. We are wretched, not because 
we are under some yoke, but because we are not 
sure whether we ought to be under it. We are 
wretched for want of some imperial voice issuing 
a command within us, and putting an end to our 
doubt. Nothing so suddenly relieves the soul, 
and clears its outlook, as to receive an order, a com- 
mand, which it is not possible for us to avoid. We 
are never really troubled by the things which we 
simply must do or which we simply must bear. We 
are troubled only by things about which we are not 
sure whether we ought to do them or bear them, or 
not. When we have received a peremptory com- 
mand — either through the circumstances of our 
life, or from some sublime inspiration within our 
153 


Our Ambiguous Life 

own soul — then our course is clear and, because the 
thing must be done, it is done easily, and indeed 
brings a wonderful happiness to us. The inevitable 
is easily borne. 

Observe then that the Apostle adds nothing in the 
way of comfort. He makes no attempt to explain 
why hardness has come to Timothy and must come 
to us all. No : with his profound knowledge of the 
human soul, he is aware that explanations do not 
help us in the real moments of our life ; that nothing 
helps except to meet the hard things, commending 
oneself to God. The only light which is of use to 
us, which can warm our hearts in their solitude or 
suffering, is not the light which comes from some 
theory which we may have about the value of trials 
and the meaning of pain, but the quiet light of faith 
which is born within us when we submit to our 
hard thing as coming from God. 

I can recall an impressive corroboration of what 
I say — that in the real moments of our life, when we 
are utterly alone because of some hard things which 
are meeting us, we are not helped by general ex- 
planations, but only by steadfast endurance and a 
grim tenacious faith. We read in the letters of 
Charles Lamb, how, on that awful night, when 
Mary, his sister, lost her reason and killed her own 
mother, Charles sat through the long night alone 
and wrote a letter to Coleridge. It is a brave letter, 
written in appalling circumstances. In a few 
days he received a reply from Coleridge. The 
154 


“Take thy share of hardness 


philosopher, after expressing his sympathy, goes on 
to explain the high benefit which even such a terrible 
providence may bring to him ; how the enduring 
of such pains is the way by which a man tastes the 
Divine Nature, and becomes detached from worldly 
things — and so forth. But Lamb replied angrily 
to his friend, bidding him cease from all such unreal 
and untimely words, and said in effect : “ I get no 
help from what you say about rising into the Divine 
nature through suffering. Indeed such language 
offends me and seems to me not to be fitting 
language for mortal men as we are. My one 
comfort, the one thing which consoles me is, now 
that the heavy blow has fallen upon me, to commit 
myself to God under it, to bear it and not to 
blaspheme.” 

Although the Apostle does not in any way soften 
his command, nevertheless in his words, he suggests 
to us — and must have suggested to Timothy — two 
thoughts, two ideas, which must appeal to every one, 
and put an end to all complaining. “ Take your 
share of hardness like a good soldier of Christ.” 
“ Like a good soldier of Christ.” It is as though 
he had said, However others may shrink from the 
hardness of life, however others may be surprised 
at the roughness of the way — fancying that God 
had sent them into this world with the one idea that 
they should have a pleasant time here ; however that 
may be the view of others, it can never be the view 
of those who take their principles of living from 
155 


Our Ambiguous Life 

Jesus Christ. However dimly we may see the 
meaning of Christ’s sufferings, we do see in them this 
law, that only through sacrifice, only through the 
travail of souls, only through the surrendering of 
ourselves for others’ sakes, does the Kingdom go 
forward. Only by this means, by the voluntary 
suffering and surrender of some for others, only 
by those who believe in God coming under the 
terrible human burden and lifting it ever so little, 
does the great day of the Lord come on. We 
therefore, who follow Christ, have no right to be 
astonished that hard things come. They are the 
things most surely promised to us : without them 
we could not breathe the real Christian air. “ You 
are a soldier of Jesus Christ,” said Paul to Timothy — 
and the world is no parading ground but a battle- 
field and place of striving. And so it should be 
enough for us, if ever we grow reluctant or bitter 
because hard things will not remove, to remember 
Christ, and to remind ourselves that we are not here 
to enjoy ourselves but to do something, perhaps to 
bear something. 

And again the Apostle says, “ Take thou thy 
share of hardness.” It is as though he said: My son, 
the world is full of hardness, and people all over the 
earth are bearing burdens and dragging their weary 
feet towards some grave. Why then should you, 
or anyone, complain of your lot and share of the 
general human trial ? “ Take your share.” 

Probably it is less than your share. Probably you 
156 


“Take thy share of hardness” 

are at ease compared with the mass of human beings 
with their incalculable troubles — the bodily pains, 
the diseases, the bereavements, the broken hearts, the 
poverty, the loneliness, the despair. Is it not a 
shame for you, for anyone, for us, to sulk and com- 
plain, and question the very goodness of God because 
things are not going smoothly, when at this moment, 
at any moment, if we could hear it, there is arising 
from the universal heart, as from a great altar of 
blood and sacrifice, a wail of pain, a sigh of weari- 
ness ? “ Take thy share of hardness ! ” It is an 

appeal to our sense of honour. For who would be 
content to be simply happy and at ease in a world 
which is groaning with its travail ? Who dare be at 
ease with a whole world in pain ? But more than 
that, there is — is there not ? — a note of triumph 
in this saying “ take thy share of hardness.” Is it 
that Paul had it in his mind, that those who would 
escape the universal toil, and would live outside the 
universal law of suffering and service, are really 
cutting themselves off from the elect of God, and 
missing the true taste of life ? They are out of the 
secret. They are outside the benediction of the 
Cross. Only they who endure the pressure of this 
life, feel its infinite promise. “ Take thy share of 
hardness ! ” As we look out upon the world and see 
that suffering, the surrendering of one for the other, 
is the law of things, as we think, for example, of the 
lives that had to be rendered and given up, of the 
blood and the tears that had to be shed before we 
157 


Our Ambiguous Life 

could possess any of the things which make life good, 
do we not feel that we are bound to take some suffer- 
ing upon ourselves, to do some genuine service to this 
world with our lives, before the night falls and our 
chance is gone ? Do we not feel as we think of this 
whole world working, toiling, enduring, as we think 
of its unrecorded heroisms, of its mute martyrdoms, 
as we see this law of sacrifice and surrender in all 
creatures — the dumb creatures even, the horse, the 
dog, surrendering themselves, and so serving some 
purpose beyond themselves — and ever over all this 
earthly scene of suffering and mutual surrender, 
as we see the Cross of Christ, God Himself in sacri- 
fice, God giving His benediction to it all — do we not 
feel that the one calamity for any of us would be to 
be at ease in the great enterprise ? Do we not feel 
that to be at ease — to have nothing to do, nothing 
to endure for the glory of God and for the welfare 
of the world, is from one point of view a cause for 
shame ; and from another point of view it is to be out 
of the real secret and rapture of living : for it is to 
be unnamed among the children of God, and in the 
Lamb’s book of life. 

“ Take thy share of hardness.” Truly in a world 
such as this is which is built upon sacrifice, where the 
altar fires are never quenched, where even the 
insects of a day, and the dumb beasts, yield their 
lives and serve a vaster purpose than they know — 
“ God forbid that it should be man, the erected, 
the reasoner, the wise in his own eyes — God forbid 
158 


“ Take thy share of hardness ” 

that it should be man that wearies in well-doing, 
that despairs of unrewarded effort, or utters the 
language of complaint. Let it be enough for faith, 
that the whole creation groans in mortal frailty, 
strives with unconquerable constancy ; surely not 
all in vain.” 


i59 


XIX 


THE INVITATION OF EASTER 

The real proof or witness to the Resurrection of 
Jesus from the dead is that the world has arisen with 
Him. There is everywhere in the New Testament 
a stir and liveliness which reminds us of nothing so 
much as morning in a cheery and healthy home. 
For any home to be as lively as the New Testament 
there will have to be quite a number of people, 
and all of them will require to be fresh and hearty. 
It will be all the better if the father and the mother 
are still young enough to be up and about. It 
will help the likeness too if we can see breakfast 
being carried up to some presumably old person 
who makes his or her home there — a grandparent 
perhaps or an older sister of the mother of the house. 
But to be at all equal to the New Testament in 
point of business and vitality, there will have to be 
youths and maidens, already wide awake, and it will 
be fine if one or other of them is chuckling with some 
song. The song of course will not have to be a 
purposed or studied thing, but simply the overflow 
of spirits, the happy sense that life deserves a song. 
Then there must be children and lots of them, 
were it only to assure us that this blessed festival 
160 


The Invitation of Easter 

of life is going to be kept up long after we are 
dead. 

I hope there are still such homes. If I knew of 
such a home and had the right of entrance, I would 
take a stranger there in secret and, as we saw the 
happy throng hushed for a little while to think 
together of God, then rising from their knees each 
to go his way and hers to meet again in the evening, 
I should whisper to the stranger — Christ came into 
the world to bring all that to pass. 

I know very well that before the New Testament 
closes, the air has lost something of its freshness. 
“ The native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with 
the pale cast of thought.” But the difference is 
not something which is merely sad. It is not sad 
at all. It is simply the ordinance of life. It is the 
difference between the light-heartedness of children 
and the soberness and gravity of experienced 
men. 

No one can read the New Testament without 
feeling that something has happened to set all this 
blessed machinery in motion. In the New Testa- 
ment everybody seems to be on his feet. Even 
in their sleep those eager ones are dreaming of some 
new strategy for the good fight of faith. And if 
we ask what it was that gave those people, and 
some of them very unlikely people too, their victory 
over all those influences which make us heavy and 
bitter and half-awake, we should do well to be 
content with their own account — that something 
161 


Our Ambiguous Life 

had happened, something which had the moral 
magnitude and significance and resultant energy 
which we understand men to be bearing witness to 
who declare that they have risen with Christ from 
the dead. 

Now I doubt very much whether we shall ever 
convince those who are not Christians in doctrine 
that our faith has a supernatural origin and has a 
supernatural nourishment, except in the way that the 
first Christians convinced outsiders in their day. 
They lived in such a way that when they were asked 
to account for themselves their story became a 
thing not incredible, a thing not to be lightly set 
aside. They lived a supernatural life, a life, that is 
to say, above nature, as nature was known to the 
world at that time. We say water cannot rise higher 
than its source. Those good people lived on a 
height, and it could not be denied by fair-minded 
observers of them that the water of life which 
nourished them on that uplifted tableland might 
well come from on high. 

I can imagine nothing more tedious and un- 
necessary than for a Church which is not living a 
supernatural life to be defending or protesting 
its supernatural birth. There is such a thing as a 
man protesting too much. There may very well be 
such a thing as a society like the Church protesting 
too much. It betrays a want of proper pride, a 
want also of personal assurance when one needs to 
call attention to oneself, or needs to say things to 
162 


The Invitation of Easter 


one’s own credit — such as that we are related to this 
one or that, or that so-and-so is a friend of ours. 
For this means that there is nothing about our very 
self — about our mind or our personality — which 
is having its influence upon people. And so we are 
taking this heavy-handed way of compelling them to 
pay some attention to us. It is a thing that requires 
to be done very carefully if one is to escape the 
secret contempt of the very people whose contempt 
it ought to be one of our minor guidances for life 
that we shall not earn. 

Precisely so, it is not a good sign when we 
Christians are too much concerned to argue with 
outsiders that our religion first and last is a thing 
above nature and the ordinary working of history. 
Because, to say no more, if we are what we should 
be, this will not be necessary. The best proof that 
the sun is there is that it shines. The only proof 
which we have any right to expect the world to pay 
the least heed to, that Christ is risen from the dead, 
is that it has made such a difference to ourselves as 
might be described by saying that we are risen 
with Him. 

And that is precisely how Christianity as a society 
began to make its way in the world. There was 
little argument for the Resurrection of Jesus. 
The Story had to be told and it is told. It is told 
with varying details as though at the outset it was 
something of which everybody was so sure that they 
did not think it necessary to be very precise or to be 
163 


Our Ambiguous Life 

meticulously informed as to all the details. S. 
Paul writing to a foreign Church having no ac- 
quaintance with Jerusalem or with Jewish ways of 
thinking, spends some time on the Resurrection of 
Jesus ; but even there it is not so much the bona 
jides of the resurrection that he seems to be contending 
for, as the bona jides of men like himself who, as he 
says, would be blasphemers to be saying something 
about God which was not true if Christ was not 
raised, and would be fools for their pains, putting 
their lives in jeopardy each day because they declared 
Him to be risen. 

Such then would be the lesson or the challenge 
to myself which I should urge on a day like Easter 
when I wish to join the Church of all ages in clinging 
to this tremendous faith. Some of us, loyal to 
historical events and to certain protests which had 
and may again have a meaning, do not keep the 
festival with the pomp and deliberateness of certain 
Churches which put the accent rather upon tradition. 
But all the more we ought so to live that it will 
never be possible even for enemies to suggest 
that ours is not a faith which has faced death and 
through Christ has mastered it. 

Let our witness to Christ risen be that we also 
with Him are risen. 

It is a great thing to rise from the dead even now, 
as in various ways and to varying depths of our 
personality we may have the experience. To 
awaken in the morning and to the morning, to shake 
164 


The Invitation of Easter 


off it may be a world of dreams and fears ; to get 
up on to our feet and to look out upon a world in 
which we have something to do, to which we have 
something to give — that is something which we 
should all see to it that we never cease to celebrate. 

In fact, Resurrection is the truth of life ; and 
those things are contrary to God’s will and our 
proper life which impede within us and around us the 
Resurrection spirit. 

But it is a sad thing when new life knocks at our 
hearts and it seems to us as though we could not open 
the door. There are things which give us such a 
feeling, things which make us unwilling, or unable as 
we think, to arise into newness of life. We know what 
such disabling and prohibiting things are. The 
human race has always known them. The deeper 
literature of man has never for long been far away 
from an interest in them. For it is the deep things 
that are common to us all. 

I am not thinking at the moment of those who 
meanwhile have no wish to be anything different 
from what they are. For them, Resurrection from 
the dead means nothing, because they propose 
that it shall mean nothing to them. 


But there are others of us who, even on a morning 
so inviting to the spirit as an Easter morning should 
be, may allow ourselves to remain unmoved and 
unblest. 


165 


Our Ambiguous Life 

We may have done something wrong ; and 
whenever we propose to rise that something holds us 
down. We know how we could gain the victory- 
over this secret thing. We know that it would cost 
something. We should have to confess, it may be, 
to the one against whom we did the wrong. And 
we should have to make such amends as are possible. 
If we cared very much for the peace of our soul we 
should face these things however costly. And we 
do care. But still we do not care sufficiently to 
make us leap to our feet and go out and not return 
until we have brought our life to a sound and 
honourable basis. And yet if we would only do this 
and do it for Christ’s sake, next moment we should 
know the beginning at least of everything that the 
saints have known through all generations. 


Are there not, Festus, are there not, dear Michal, 
Two points in the adventure of the diver, 

One — when, a beggar, he prepares to plunge, 

One — when, a prince, he rises with his pearl ? 


Then again there is the tyranny of some habit 
in which now our personal life lies bound as in a 
shroud. For habit is a real and it may be an awful 
form of death. We do things. We do them 
again ; until one day they happen of their own 
will, without any conscious concurrence. It may 
be that we are not aware of having mortgaged our 
166 


The Invitation of Easter 

moral freedom. We should resent with heat the 
suggestion that we are not complete masters of our- 
selves. We may honestly suppose that we have only 
to make up our mind to do what we want to do and 
we shall do it — not perceiving that in a saying of 
that kind we are guilty of quite half-a-dozen 
deceptions of ourselves. Of course if we make up 
our mind to do a thing we shall do it. But the fact 
is we shall not make up our mind, and the reason is 
not that we choose not to, but that we cannot. 
Precisely so, it may be true that we are able to do 
anything we want to do ; but once again the point 
is that less and less shall we want to do certain 
things. 

Serious people have always spoken gravely of the 
force of habit ; and all that we know to-day of the 
processes of the brain tends to confirm the serious 
language of simpler times. We know now that every 
several choice of ours affects in a concrete and material 
way the very substance and disposition of the brain. 
We may do a thing, and say to ourselves that we 
shall not count it. Yes : but it is counted. In 
the midst of the very stuff of which our personal 
life is formed that decision of ours has been registered. 
Each time the thing is repeated the mark in our 
brain has, so to speak, been underlined, until there is 
something there like an etched line on copper. So 
long as we consent to this habitual life of ours it 
does not trouble us. So long as we are going its 
way, we are quite comfortable within ourselves. 

167 


Our Ambiguous Life 

It is when we put about and face the weather 
that we know what had been our condition all 
the time. 

And so in the case of many of us, truth comes to 
us and goes away. We hear a knock. We know 
also Who it is and that it would be good for us to 
let Him in. But to let Him in would mean so much. 
And so, we sit still ; or we busy ourselves super- 
ficially, and the strain of the moment passes. 

These in the case of most of us are the things 
that keep us from arising when our light is come 
and the Glory of the Lord is risen upon us. We 
have done something. Or we have allowed ourselves 
to become something. 

But what are we to do, or what are they to do who 
are in that case ? Here one might speak too easily ; 
but this is a matter on which I believe serious people 
would rather have the truth though it does not 
flatter them. 

I am quite sure that there is moral and spiritual 
assistance awaiting everyone who sincerely wishes 
to arise, either from the temporary disorder of the 
soul caused by a sin, or from the tyranny of some 
adverse habit long-indulged. The man of course 
must be sincere. He must mean it. That being so, 
the next thing is he must not allow his mind to dwell 
upon the cost of the step, but only upon the right- 
ness of it, and the necessity of it if he is to continue 
to respect himself. Finally, he must make clear to 
his own mind the difference between trying himself 
168 


The Invitation of Easter 


to do something, and allowing God in Christ to 
occupy his heart and to do that thing with him. 
For the final truth about any of us is not that we are 
able to do or to become this or that, but that He is able 
to do this or that for us and through us and in us. 


169 


XX 


FROM EASTER TO PENTECOST IN THE 
REGION OF THE SOUL 

There is much to be said for the practice of those 
Churches which put the accent upon tradition and 
for the practice, as it was of the undivided Church, 
of going over regularly and statedly the chief events 
in the life and experience of our Lord. The value 
of this practice is not merely to settle in the minds 
of Christians an early and habitual acquaintance 
with those events and with that Holy Life which 
achieved the perfect approval of God — thereby 
erecting in the human soul a standard higher than 
its own. There is a value in addition. It is this. 
By contemplating regularly and of set purpose the 
great events which the life and death of Jesus pro- 
voked, we are acquiring for ourselves and for those 
to whom we may transmit it, a certain type of 
conscience and final sympathy. And this in turn 
becomes our light and the thing we fall back upon 
for our comfort as often as life brings over us in a 
measure any of those tragic experiences which 
gathered over Jesus because of His fidelity. One 
who is truly Christian asks no further explanation 
of life — of its harshness or of its mystery — the moment 
170 


From Easter to Pentecost 


that harshness or that mystery has taken him where, 
he recalls, it took his Master. We do not greatly 
mind a time of darkness if without pride we can feel 
that once upon a time that very quality of darkness 
lay over Jesus. The whole thing may still be a 
problem to our intelligence or to our moral sense, 
but we feel that if Christ endured it without bitter- 
ness we may try. 

We have something of the same comfort as often 
as we can feel that the first followers of Jesus, those 
who were enabled to achieve in personal character 
and in unworldly service what they achieved, (that 
they also) were subjected to the same strains, to the 
same defeats and delays, to the same dubieties and 
ambiguities in their allegiance to Christ as is our 
portion. For, once again, we ought to think little 
of experiences however hard they may be which 
admit us to the society of the finer sort of human 
beings. 

It seems but yesterday when we were celebrating 
Easter, confronting our minds anew with the various 
incidents of that great dawn. Looking back upon 
the story even from this short distance, some things 
stand out, it may be, more clearly. We must have 
noticed then, and I recall it now, the secrecy and 
hiddenness of the Resurrection, how it was not, 
like the death of Christ, a public spectacle. It came 
home to people, for the most part one by one, that 
Christ was risen. Even in the case of those to whom 
He showed Himself alive and risen the evidence 
171 


Our Ambiguous Life 

always seems to us to hesitate and fall short. The 
evidence is never less than enough for those who are 
convinced by it. But it would not be enough for 
those who had not already a certain inclination 
towards believing. The evidence for the Resur- 
rection of Jesus was not (it would seem) of a kind 
by itself to convince the world. It was enough for 
those for whom it was enough. If men are 
disposed to doubt the reality of the thing itself, 
they must at least confess that the belief in Christ 
risen from the dead had upon those who embraced 
it such power that from the moment they were new 
men and women — and new with that kind of new- 
ness which we may have seen on some one who we 
know has passed through some crisis which took him 
up to something as real and final as death. We are 
right to be impatient of people who speak lightly 
of a faith which has the power to take a man to pieces 
and to build him up again, enabling him not only 
to die for his vision, but to live for it — that is, to die 
daily. 

For indeed that is how we live on any level deeper 
and finer than the gross life of the flesh. The idea 
that there may be something finer in life than appears 
upon the surface is an idea for which there will always 
be something to be said and that something for 
certain natures will be enough. But it is an idea 
against which it will always be possible to say 
many things, and if men are disposed to take the 
lower view it will never be hard for them to find 


172 


From Easter to Pentecost 


reasons. I am afraid we must leave at that, what 
shall be our ultimate reading of life. 


For those who became aware of Christ as no 
longer holden of death, but risen and alive for ever- 
more, there was no further dubiety. In all that we 
read about them in those days which immediately 
followed, they affect us as being people who have 
just passed through a shaking experience. The 
old foundations for their life have given way. For 
a little while they seem to themselves to be falling 
through space down into nothingness. But the 
fact is they fell through veils and veils of unreality 
and came to rest in a new apprehension of God. 

I do not want to believe that in their case this was 
easy. I am glad to find evidence, as in the Emmaus 
story, that it was hard. I do not mean to say that 
for one moment they were in doubt as to what had 
happened to them. I only mean to say that it took 
time and prayer and a certain solitude to bring 
calmness into hearts which had been made raw 
with the disaster of Calvary, and with their own 
thoughts about themselves. 

Now it may be good for us to dwell for a little 
while upon that — upon the behaviour and practice 
of those simple men and women when suddenly, 
after the shock of Calvary, this new world of the 
Spirit, of the Unseen, burst upon them with the 
Risen Christ. For it is of great value to us to know 
173 


Our Ambiguous Life 

what to do with ourselves when as the result of some- 
thing our heart has become alive to the unseen. 
In every life there are spaces and tracts which, 
from the point of view of one’s essential spirit, are 
of little consequence. There are common days, 
when we simply go on. But there are days of another 
kind, days when our heart and flesh cry out — it 
may be with joy; it may be in pain. On the 
way of life by which we all of us travel, things 
meet us which have the effect of challenging 
our final faith and motive. It may be the coming 
of love. It may be an abrupt change for worse 
or better in our fortune. It may be some fell 
stroke of death. In each case, as we see when we are 
sufficiently master of ourselves to form ideas, the 
bottom has gone out of our earlier universe. We 
are in a maze. The old world of nature, and of 
human beings, looks unreal. For the time being 
we are not quite real to ourselves. We only know 
that this state in which we are for the moment 
is something which will pass. How it will pass 
we cannot say, but that it will pass we know ; 
for life could not continue, in the one case in such 
ecstasy, or in the other in such pain and emptiness. 

Now if anything like this has come to us in these 
recent days or is about us now — something which has 
made our heart tender, susceptible to the unseen, 
disposed it may be to take up a new attitude to life 
on the whole or a new attitude on some point of 
personal behaviour — there is guidance for us in the 
*74 


From Easter to Pentecost 


example of those first followers of Jesus, and a good 
hope from their experience. 

For the terrible danger of life is that fine things 
die. The rough context of the world eats into them. 
There is a phrase which I recall from a poignant 
Russian story. A youth of genius had been playing 
on the piano, in the hired lodging of a friend. 
Other youths were present, brilliant, careless, 
sensual. But the youth with his great music had 
silenced them one by one. One by one under the 
spell of beauty they had felt this hot evil world 
lose its interest for them. Now were they voyaging 
in the eternal world, that world which is free from 
space and time, that world in which all former things 
are passed away. When suddenly the player ceased, 
turned round and said a ribald thing ! Everyone 
felt insulted, mocked, spat upon : and one spoke 
for them all who turning to the piano shouted : 
“ Hush, man, you are not fit to be yourself ! ” 

There are, surely there are or have been such 
moments in all lives, moments which later on may 
look at us with some terrible reproach, convicting 
us that we are not fit to be ourselves, that we did 
not have it in us to keep up the dignity and tender- 
ness of some great hour. 

Now how did these simple men and women pass 
through the bewilderment of Easter and step out 
new men and women to the tasks which will always 
need to be undertaken and will always be under- 
taken only by those to whom life has given the 
175 


Our Ambiguous Life 

vision of God, and of Christ not dead but alive 
for ever ? 

It is all very simple. First of all, they had that 
mark of a deep experience — they suddenly wanted 
to be kind : and, to begin with, to be kind to one 
another. One proof that they had come within 
sight of another world was that they began not to be 
so greatly concerned about this. Once upon a time 
they had disputed with one another as to who should 
have pre-eminence when Christ came into His 
Kingdom. Now they did not dispute about that. 
Or if they did it was with the parts reversed ; for 
they knew now what Christ’s Kingdom might 
involve, and that he who loves most shall bear most. 

That was one thing then they did. We should 
do well to follow their example who wish to keep 
alive within ourselves some happy strain, some fine 
tension of the spirit, and not to sink back into 
commonness. 

Another thing they did, doubtless without 
thinking that it was wise, but simply feeling that it 
was something which they wished to do. They 
clung to one another. They re-discovered their 
friends. They suddenly perceived that amazing 
gift of God to us in having given us friends. There 
they were, a small group of people who had passed 
through the same experience, who understood each 
other’s thought afar off. Round about them was the 
great world full then as now of so many things which 
seem to give the lie to any fine way of conceiving 
176 


From Easter to Pentecost 


life. What was there for them to do, as indeed 
what is there for us to do, for us whom God has made 
aware of our own hearts and of His goodness to us, 
but to come nearer to one another ? 

And finally, they waited . We have almost lost 
the power to wait for anything. We have many thin 
and superficial voices in our midst to-day counsel- 
ling us to haste. These seem to think that waiting is 
weakness. Let them try. 

These waited, not idly, not with vacant minds. 
Still less did they wait selfishly. They met together. 
They spoke to one another of what they knew in 
common, and of how they were being helped through 
one day and another. But they never doubted that 
this was not all that God intended for them. What 
further was coming to them of course they did not 
know, any more than we know. They kept the door 
upon the latch for Christ. They mused and mused. 
Until.one day the fire burned. Their hearts became 
full to the point of overflowing : and where should 
hearts that are full of faith and of vision — where 
should they overflow but on a parched and hungry 
world ! The day of Pentecost was fully come. 


1 77 


12 


XXI 


“ FOLLOW ME AND LEAVE THE DEAD TO 
BURY THEIR OWN DEAD ” 

Many a time have I looked at these words and 
thought to write on them ; but I have always ended 
by looking for a subject elsewhere. Why trouble 
to clear up the difficulties in one saying of Jesus, 
when there are so many sayings of Jesus with which 
it is so much more comfortable to deal, which also 
are free from any obscurity ! But I have always 
felt that that was a feeble and disingenuous attitude. 
Sometimes indeed I have told myself that perhaps 
the thing that was really keeping me from going 
into this saying of Jesus was simply that I myself 
did not like it : and this because it seemed to make 
a demand of us all which I for my own part was not 
ready or at least not eager to meet. And yet one 
can say quite honestly that it was not that only and 
in one’s better moments not that at all which kept 
one from dealing directly and honestly with these 
words of Jesus. In recent years and at this very 
moment good and serious men have no faith in easy 
and plausible solutions : and any one who offers us 
a cheap and comfortable formula for dealing with 
178 


“ Follow Me 


life, though he may have a vogue with the ground- 
lings, announces himself in the view of thoughtful 
people as either a fool or a knave. 


“ It is by no breath, 
Turn of eye, wave of hand, that salvation 
Joins issue with death!” 


Infinite mischief has been done by the spread of 
the idea that somehow Christianity helps those who 
profess it either to shut their eyes to difficulties and 
embarrassments in their own personal life and in the 
general life of man, or recommends for the treatment 
of such difficulties and embarrassments a process 
which works easily, like magic. Whereas, the fact 
is, Christ made the severest appeal that ever reached 
the soul of man ; and He supposed that He had put 
the very heart of His meaning beyond all doubt, by 
accepting for Himself the cruelty and disgrace of the 
Cross. 

And yet, it was not the severity of our Lord’s 
words here, which, unless in one’s bad hours, kept 
one from a frank and hearty consideration of them. 
What rather estranged one and made one uneasy — 
so that he was glad to think of the blessed abundance 
of genial and sympathetic things which Jesus also 
said — was, that in this particular saying of His as it 
stands and as it strikes us on a first reading, there 
is a something which, had the words been spoken 
by another, we should have pronounced harsh and 
indeed inhuman. “ Lord, suffer me first to go and 
179 


Our Ambiguous Life 

bury my father ” : “ Follow me, and leave the dead 
to bury their own dead.” There is something 
there which, had it come from other lips, we 
should have resented. 

Of course there are those of a fanatical and excited 
temper who will have no difficulty. These will say, 
“ There are the words of Jesus : you must take 
them or leave them ! ” There are those who will 
even say that we do wrong to try to understand 
words spoken by our Lord in any sense beyond the 
obvious sense. And there is something quite 
just in that. We must take care not to try to bring 
truth down to our level, but rather to raise our- 
selves to the level of truth, and give ourselves no 
rest until we are there. But this is not to say that 
we are not to try to understand words of Jesus 
which seem to conflict with some deep and elemen- 
tary moral principle or human piety. If, on a first 
reading, those words seem to us harsh, if they 
seem to open the door to a certain unfeelingness 
and cruelty, we are bound out of regard even to the 
moral majesty of Jesus so to grasp His intention 
that we shall acknowledge with our whole being — 
with our heart and mind alike — that even in this 
strange utterance He is worthy of Himself and 
is asking of us something which, far from being 
contrary to man’s higher nature, is indeed its conse- 
cration and its crown. 

In approaching any word of Jesus which seems 
hard and not obviously in harmony with His Great 
180 


“ Follow Me” 


Charity, we shall of course naturally and instinctively 
take care always to keep the particular thing (which 
is troubling us) well within the circle of His Infi- 
nite Love for us, which is the general and habitual 
effect upon us of our faith in Him. It is a very 
poor kind of love which goes off at a word. “ Love 
is not love,’” says Shakespeare, “ which alters 
when it alteration finds.” And still less is that love 
which leaps to some wretched conclusion on the 
basis of something which, were we determinedly 
kind, is capable of some innocent or even beautiful 
interpretation. “ Love taketh no account of evil,” 
says S. Paul. Love, that is to say, has a note-book 
with pages and pages on which grounds of offence 
or anger or suspicion are to be entered with the very 
date and the very hour : but when you open love’s 
note-book, you find those pages clean and empty. 
“ Love keeps no record of the Evil.” 

When Jesus says something which sounds to me 
harsh, or something which, had another said it, I 
might have pronounced even cruel, I am to say to 
myself : “ No, whatever I may end by thinking 
of those particular words of His, I am not going to 
call them harsh or cruel. For He could never be 
cruel, or encourage in the human heart anything 
even unkind, who said all the other wonderful 
things which He did say, and who crowned all by 
laying down His life in sheer love of us, and with the 
hope of making us good.” 

Is not that how we act towards any human 
181 


Our Ambiguous Life 

being whom we have great reason to trust, or any 
human being whom we ever truly loved ? When 
something appears in one in whom we trust or whom 
we love, something which, at a glance, or as it comes 
to us in some vague rumour, conflicts with that best 
of his which we have seen and known on some fine 
occasion or in the intercourse of years, we should be 
despicable creatures, unworthy of the great name of 
man, were we to let that one thing poison our 
life, forgetting, in a wave of anger or petulance, the 
tenderness of some earlier day, or the steady fidelity 
of a long companionship. 

I say, we should not, unless we are no better than 
spoiled children, behave in such a way towards 
another human soul which in its love or in its 
trustfulness had ever opened itself to ours. And, 
it is one way of stating the whole mind of Christ 
to say, that He, Christ, asks us to show the same 
loyalty, the same belief, the same resoluteness to put 
the fine interpretation upon those things in His own 
testimony and in the Providence of God which may 
cast a momentary shadow, or interrupt for an instant 
or for a day or even for many years the radiance 
of His obvious and incontrovertible Goodness. 

Taking this incident as we have it and not trying 
in any way to soften the apparent harshness of our 
Lord’s words, it is possible for us to justify that 
harshness. 

We who are alive to-day are well aware that a 
situation may arise in which the language used here 
182 


“ Follow Me 


by our Lord — abrupt and unrelenting as it is — is the 
only language that is possible. There may be some- 
thing impending, so grave, and, should it come to 
pass, so irretrievable, that any language is to be 
approved however fierce and unbending which has 
the effect of arousing a dull mind to the approaching 
peril. And we know that there are circumstances 
in which even the dearest human and natural duties 
must wait or for the time being be abandoned, so 
that a man may rush to his place to defend some 
larger interest — the safety of his country, for 
example, or the life of another human being which 
he perceives to be threatened. We should none 
of us justify or excuse a man allowing a child to 
drown or to be ill-treated by a ruffian, on the ground 
that the man was in an honest hurry, or was even on 
the way to his father’s funeral. Even we should say 
that in this world there are moments in which some- 
thing may leap up in front of a man and to that he 
must attend or fall into contempt. And if the words 
of Jesus in this place serve to remind us all that there 
are calls, demands, duties which may suddenly 
register themselves in a man’s conscience, and that 
to these he must pay heed even if for the time or 
even for ever he has to neglect home and kindred — 
it was well that these words were spoken. 

Of course, the severity of Jesus here would be 
very happily explained for it would be explained 
away, if the man to whom our Lord spoke with 
such sharpness was at that moment simply a fraud. 

183 


Our Ambiguous Life 

If he was trying to deceive Jesus, and to deceive 
himself, giving as a reason what he himself knew 
was only an excuse, why in that case, no words 
could be too severe. If he was at heart and bottom 
a good man, or if he ever became a good man, he 
would thank Jesus later on for having pulled him up 
so suddenly and for having compelled him to look at 
himself in such a faithful mirror. 


Still when all is said, it is a great relief to me to 
believe that what I have been calling a certain 
harshness in this reply of our Lord, can be explained. 
The fact is Jesus did not say the very thing which 
alone gives what He did say its appearance of un- 
feelingness. 

When this man — a disciple he was — came to Jesus 
and said, “ Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my 
father,” here is what for myself I used to think of 
his position. 

I imagined that here was a disciple of Jesus, a man 
who had been listening to the teaching of Jesus day 
by day, making what he could of it ; and now Jesus 
was inviting him and others to commit themselves 
more definitely to His cause : to take on some new 
responsibility. Just at that very moment — this was 
what I used to think — news came to this poor man 
— for in those days my sympathies were rather with 
him — that his father, an old and lonely man I 
pictured him, had died, and summoning the son to 
184 


“Follow Me” 


his home, were it only to give his father a decent 
burial. That was what I supposed had taken place. 
That being so, Jesus, our Lord, from whose lips 
came the great words and ideas on which all our 
later good manners and pieties have been founded, 
Jesus in His reply to a disciple who had lost his 
father was actually forbidding him to go home for 
a day or two days, or a week it might be, to follow 
the old man’s body to its last resting-place. 

I somehow did not like that story ; and seeing no 
way of softening the harshness of it, I was content 
to let it alone. Of course, later I knew what the 
commentators had to say about it who just here are 
as busy as ants. But their ideas were so far-fetched 
and sometimes so amusing that they did nothing to 
ease my mind. 

And yet it is all so simple ; and what Jesus did 
say, in the circumstances as I see them now, is so 
obviously right and necessary and the very voice 
of a Redeeming God to any man in the same cir- 
cumstances, that a story which I used to avoid is 
now one which I know I dare not neglect. It so 
hurts me and heals me and summons me, it so 
deals with the human soul at the particular 
stage which my own soul has reached, and in 
view of the outstanding peril of men of my own 
age, that this is a place which I must frequent or 
in some precious matters consent to die. 

The fact is, the man’s father was not dead. 
Perhaps he lived for many a year after this story. 

185 


Our Ambiguous Life 

Perhaps he had time himself to become a Christian 
before he died, in which case he would many a time 
rally his son on this story. But certainly, the fact 
is he was not at this time dead. And so, we may 
banish from our minds all sad pictures of an old man 
lying unburied, and his son, his only son perhaps, his 
eldest son certainly, not being allowed by Jesus to 
go home for a day to see his body laid to rest. 
Fancy us thinking that Jesus could do a thing like 
that ! 

No, here is the whole story. When the disciple 
asked leave “ to go home and bury his father,” he was 
making use of a phrase which everybody in his day 
who spoke his language immediately understood. 
He meant simply “ Master, my father is still alive : 
and as Thou knowest it is my duty as his son to stand 
by him, to see him out of life. Thou knowest the 
law of Moses, and the sacred habits of our people. 
Thou rememberest how it comforted Jacob as an 
old man to know that it would be the hands of 
his own son which would lower his body to the 
grave. 

“That is my position. I have a father. I do not 
say he is at this moment dying, still less do I say that 
he is dead and unburied ; but one day he will die. 
And so, Lord, I feel that I am not free to go about 
with Thee until my father is in fact dead.” 

To which our Lord replied in effect : That is 
to say, you suggest to Me that you yourself cannot 
186 


14 Follow Me” 

begin to be a man, and to assume the status and 
responsibility of a man, until your father is dead. 
Is that what you conceive your part in life to be — 
to do nothing of your very own, nothing out of the 
tumult or vision of your own soul, nothing for life 
as you with your own eyes see it, until your father 
dies ? But suppose your father reaches the average 
term which God has set to a human life — seventy or 
seventy-five or eighty let it be. By that time you 
will be a man of fifty to sixty — past your best, 
having lived down your own best hours and thwarted 
all those great proposals of God that come to us one 
by one in our youth and first manhood. Do you 
propose to do nothing distinct and individual, 
nothing but hang about the old place, watching the 
time pass, until you reach an age at which all the 
dreamers, poets, artists, and formers of the world’s 
best life have already and long since done their 
greatest and truest work ? Are you content to 
make of your life — and this in the season when it is 
most fresh and daring — nothing but a dreary waiting 
for the burial of a relative ? And when that day 
comes, your father dead and buried, what then of 
you ? Do you suppose that a man of fifty or fifty- 
five or sixty — and one who like you has felt the 
summons to a definite and daring life and has 
suppressed that summons and many another fine 
uprising in his own soul, do you suppose that all at 
once you are going to be a hero, a worker, a striver 
on behalf of threatened causes, a seeker-out of 
187 


Our Ambiguous Life 

danger, with blood throbbing in your veins and 
knocking at your brain, searching for some costly 
outlet ? If so, you deceive yourself. A man has 
himself as he uses himself. And at fifty or fifty-five 
or sixty — in the region of our physical and moral 
nature alike — the bills begin to come in to which 
we put our careless signature in the unthinking 
earlier days. 

No, sir. You have a chance : and your chance is 
— now. If a man is ever going to be a great man, 
or a good man, or, as we say, a man, he must begin 
to be that very thing here and now. And as for 
your father, the greatest honour you can do him 
is by so living now that he will be proud he begat 
you. 

Once more : you have your chance. And it 
is here and now. It may be that through all eternity 
forces have been working towards this very point, 
this diamond-point in human history when you 
should stand before Me, feeling the call of some- 
thing within you about which you do not know much 
except this : that it seems to you to be true, fine, 
great, difficult — in fact the very thing you came into 
life for. There you stand, poised between two 
careers ; at the cross-roads ; and your next step 
is going to lead on a step still further in the same 
direction, and that to another and another until 
the end. 

You are now arrived at that keen edge of personal 
feeling where, for the first time, a man deals with 
188 


“ Follow Me 


God and his own soul. I congratulate you on having 
reached your own great hour. For myself I see only 
one way to make your great hour great indeed. 
There is through this life of ours a high road and 
there is a low road. I plead with you to obey your 
spirit’s highest impulse. Follow Me. As for your 
old father, if you really ever meant anything by 
bringing him in, have no fear. God, who has cared 
so much for you as to work you towards this great 
moment, will see that your old father shares in the 
blessedness that is offering itself to you. 

Wherefore, arise and shine, for thy light is come, 
and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee. 


XXII 


FAITH OUR DEFENCE AGAINST 
CONDITIONS 

In that most beautiful of all S. Paul’s letters — the 
letter to the Philippians, the Apostle writes quite 
casually and as though there were nothing remark- 
able about the message : “ All the saints salute you, 
chiefly they that are of Caesar’s household.” When 
we remind ourselves that the “ Caesar ” who is 
mentioned here is none other than the monstrous 
Nero, we become aware that beneath these simple 
words there is a very beautiful and arresting truth. 
It would appear that saintly people were to be found 
even in Nero’s household. In the midst of that 
tainted atmosphere which was Nero’s chosen element 
there were saints kept by the power of God. Day 
by day, under the shadow of Nero — the coarse and 
pitiless Emperor of Rome who in his own personal 
behaviour and in the circumstances of his court 
was so outrageously unholy that in the mind of the 
early Church he was Antichrist — there lived, 
breathing the air he breathed, moving in and out 
amongst the unspeakable scenes of his court, certain 
ones without contamination for their lives were hid 
with Christ in God. It was the last place where 
190 


Faith, our Defence against Conditions 

one would have looked for saints — in the house- 
hold of Nero. Yet there they were living their 
wholesome lives, with everything, as it seemed, 
against them. They were enabled daily to pass 
through grave moral risks without yielding to any 
sudden assaults, or drifting with the tide which was 
bearing every one about them out into a ruinous 
waste. In short, saints were to be found in Nero’s 
household. That then, is our subject. It is a thing 
we should like to believe with more thoroughness — 
that our surroundings need not control our character 
or effect the inmost quality of our life ; that there is 
within each human breast, a citadel which cannot be 
stormed from without, but yields only when it has 
been betrayed. 


This belief, that we are responsible beings, that 
we act from a centre to which we ourselves alone have 
access, lies at the basis alike of social law and of 
religion. The fact that the state punishes a wrong- 
doer means that according to the belief of the state 
it lay within the power of the offender to do rightly, 
or at least to avoid wrong-doing. In the same way, 
the demand which every conscience hears, the 
personal call of God, carries with it the feeling that 
it lies within his power who hears, to rise up out of 
every bondage and obey. 

This used to be looked upon as the inalienable 
right of a man, as the very fact which made him a 
191 


Our Ambiguous Life 

man — that God had endowed him with the power of 
will, the power, in the region of character, to choose 
his way. This used to be considered man’s very 
crown — that he had within himself if he cared to put 
it to the test, the power to oppose circumstances, 
to use circumstances for his own high purposes, 
to master them and draw personal glories and graces 
from them — no matter how grim and contrary 
they might be. This was our language, our out- 
look, until yesterday, so to speak. There was a 
cheery sense that any life worth living must be hard ; 
that circumstances were there only for our sakes — 
that we might feel the challenge of them and meet 
it in the strength of the soul, and as the free children 
of God. 

But compare with such a way of speaking, the 
language which has now become familiar. Contrast 
it with the depression of spirits which so many now 
yield to without any sense that it is a weakness on 
their part and a disloyalty to the great cause of man 
in this world. How much melancholy there is 
to-day ! How keenly we feel the difficulty of a 
high and victorious life ! How resigned we are all 
becoming to failure and to backsliding because of 
the things that are against us ! Now much are we 
now laying at the door of what we call “ the force of 
circumstances ” ! 

We have such phrases as “ the pathos of life,” 
and we permit our wills to go to sleep over them. 
We have lost our love for the strong resolute words 
192 


Faith our Defence against Conditions 

which brace the soul in the very utterance. We 
have lost the erect and lordly air of men — of those 
who know that the will is inviolable to the assault 
of circumstances, who know that God is with us 
in every trial of the spirit. 

This unheroic and somewhat abject attitude, 
which we so easily fall into in these days, may be due 
to thinness of the blood, or to some other subtle 
penalty which we pay for our long civilization. 
But certain it is that no service so cries out to be 
rendered, no need is so peremptory in our day, as, 
to reassert the human will, to reassert that man is 
sui generis , that he is like no other creature on God’s 
earth, that he is made in the image of God, with all 
the resources of the Godhead on his side in his 
solitary striving against the evil in his own nature and 
in the world. By some means, by all means, man 
must be taught to believe in himself again ; to 
believe that in any surroundings, in spite of riches 
or of poverty, in spite of a tainted body and a 
degenerate mind, he is capable still of a direct appeal 
to God — for power to be himself and to stand out 
in the light. By all means, man must be taught to 
hold up his head in the face of all difficulties, “ to 
lift up his eyes unto the hills.” 

Now, it may help us to get back this self-respect, 
this confidence that by the help of God we may live 
our chosen life in any — even the worst — conditions, 
(it may help us to get back this feeling of security 
in the midst of the constant pressure and threatening 
193 


13 


Our Ambiguous Life 

of our lot) if we consider for a moment how this 
confidence has been lost or may well be lost. 

Circumstances will be with us always as they have 
been with us hitherto. The peculiar duties which 
fall to each of us arise out of the particular circum- 
stances of his lot or hers. Those therefore who 
complain of their circumstances as interfering with 
their personal life are really complaining of the 
duties which God is asking of them in particular. 
There are no duties apart from special circum- 
stances ; and it is vain to speak of serving God or of 
being a true man if only certain circumstances were 
removed. I say, this has always been our condition. 
Each one finds himself in the midst of circum- 
stances, in which — either with their help or in 
spite of their hindrance — he is to live for the highest 
that he knows, in obedience to the rebukes and 
inspirations of God. We were born into a world 
and into a society and into a particular situation 
each of which was here before we arrived. It is 
down in the midst of these circumstances that we are 
to shape our course ; there and nowhere else we are 
to defend and improve our soul. That was our 
condition from the beginning. To live for the soul, 
by the voice and vision of God, was never an easy or 
a natural thing. It was always a wrestling and a 
warfare. Things were always against us. 

It may well be, however, that in these days we 
are more keenly aware of the things that are against 
us. There is now the uneasy feeling that after all 
194 


Faith our Defence against Conditions 

we may not be free. Our parents, when they gave 
us their form and features, gave us also something 
of their mind, of their temperament, of their will. 
We are in a very real sense under the tyranny of the 
dead hand. We are born with a certain bias — with 
a certain weakness or instability. We have to-day 
the word “ heredity ” — though we always had the 
thing itself. We have learned, that is to say, that 
the circumstances of moral life are not merely those 
difficulties and contradictions which we encounter 
in the world. We have learned that we must strive 
against certain forces and appetites within our- 
selves, secret enemies that swarm and throb in our 
blood. 

But this new knowledge does not alter in the 
slightest degree the conditions of right and holy 
living. The terms of the good fight of faith remain 
precisely what they always were. Men who were in 
earnest to save their soul were always aware that 
the most insidious enemies with which they had to 
deal lay within their own hearts. Holy Scripture 
which demands of man the highest life is well aware 
that man lives in a dangerous atmosphere, and that 
there is a risk in his blood. The Apostle Paul, 
who in all his letters is seen wrestling for his soul, 
knows that he like every other has to contend with 
the world, the flesh, and the devil (society, heredity, 
and environment). That he has to urge his way not 
only through external obstacles — poverty, defeat 
and the reproach of men ; but that all the while 


Our Ambiguous Life 

there is a dead body — as he calls it — settled on him, 
an old man with his affections and lusts ; and yet 
God has called him to wrestle in the midst of these 
things until the breaking of the day. His confidence 
is just this : he is at least as sure that God has called 
him to a holy life as he is sure of the hindrances to 
such a life. He is as sure of God who is with him, 
as he is of the things that are against him. And 
so, though he is troubled on every side, yet is he 
not distressed ; “ though perplexed yet not in 

despair ; though cast down, yet not destroyed.” 

In the same way we must trust absolutely and 
thoroughly believe in God’s call to us one by one 
to live by the spirit of goodness. Over against 
those things which are spoken of to-day as though 
they reduced our responsibility to God — over 
against the facts of life and the world, we must 
accentuate and pay respect to certain other facts of 
the spirit. The fact that the voice of God, of 
the ideal and the holy, makes itself heard in every 
normal life ; the fact that happiness breaks upon 
us like sunlight when we obey, that a private and 
obstinate misery overtakes us when we act against 
light, against the witness of God — these are also 
facts, these are God’s facts within us, by which He 
would instruct us as to the kind of world in which He 
has placed us, and as to how He means us to acquit 
ourselves. Circumstances — of birth and the rest — 
need not settle our doom. They only fix the par- 
ticular field on which we are one by one to fight the 
196 


Faith our Defence against Conditions 

great battle of the Lord. And so, the way by which 
we may best help others and help ourselves in these 
days to regain our self-respect, our confidence that 
we are truly qualified for life, is to assert that the 
human soul may keep in contact and communion 
with the free spirit of God. 

I do believe that we begin to give way before our 
circumstances and to lose our confidence before the 
face of life, not as the result of our opinions — the 
result of what we have been reading or hearing, 
but as the result of our own personal behaviour. 
I mean, that God has equipped each one of us with 
a certain personal force, a certain zest for the 
engagement of life, a certain confidence in our 
superiority over circumstances — and this we have 
until we lose it. It is only after we have given way 
more than once that we begin to think we could 
never have done anything else. We begin to think 
that certain things are irresistible because we have 
not resisted them. Nothing so disheartens the 
soul as to have given way. Our whole view of 
this matter — whether we are to be masters or 
slaves in this world from the moral standpoint — • 
comes to depend upon our own personal history. 
If we have been yielding, giving way here and 
there, we come to believe that nothing else was 
ever possible, and that those who speak differently 
are not honest. 

But this is likewise true. Nothing so immedi- 
ately puts heart into us, and gives us hope in face of 
197 


Our Ambiguous Life 

life, as to have put down our foot with emphasis 
upon some temptation. We learn the glorious use 
of the foot in moral matters only by exercise. 
Nothing so rejoices the soul, making the future plain 
and sure, as to have won a clean victory over one- 
self. If that victory is repeated, if the line of battle 
is pushed forward into other fields, if a man in a 
series of personal engagements has vindicated the 
spirit within him, then he becomes sure with an 
unconquerable confidence that he is on the way 
of the true life and that God’s call to him is not 
in vain. Each victory brings a reinforcement not 
of spiritual faculty only, but of faith and happy 
anticipation. 

We take a long time to learn what our Lord 
prepared us for, that the only way to be good in this 
world is to be thoroughly good, with our goodness 
rooted and grounded in God. It is vain to trust 
our own natural goodness, our own right feelings 
and sense of decency to carry us through the long 
siege of circumstances. The source of any life 
which would remain steadfast to the end, must not 
lie near the surface : it must be remote and lonely 
and aloft. Its centre and home must be in God. 
Therefore a man is not wise who, knowing the 
lurking possibilities of his own nature and the 
multitude of hostile things, does not dwell in the 
shadow of Jesus Christ, clothing himself daily in 
Christ’s spiritual beauty, in Christ’s perfect confi- 
dence in God. 


Faith our Defence against Conditions 

I am sure we are none of us really free until we 
have committed ourselves without reserve to the 
overtures of Jesus Christ of which we are all aware. 
It lights up everything, to perceive that we are truly 
ourselves only when we reckon ourselves no longer 
our own but His. 


199 


XXIII 


THE PARTING OF FRIENDS 

The human heart is the same yesterday and to-day 
and for ever, and its sorrows and trials are the same. 
When all is said, it brings us a real com 'ort to realize 
that this is so. If we were left to suppose, when 
some great grief came to ourselves, that we were there 
and then enduring something which no other had 
ever experienced, might we not go on to conclude 
that this grief of ours was a mere accident, some- 
thing which had not been forseen, something for 
which no provision had been made in the eternal 
counsels of God ? But when we are brought face 
to face with an incident which, alas, has become an 
everyday experience with us, of friends parting from 
one another, never to see each other again — when we 
witness their grief, their dumb and impotent dis- 
tress, when we feel that they, though they lived 
two thousand years ago, had the very feelings which 
|we in the circumstances !are aware of ; when, in fact, 
we realize that our grief, however great it be, is no 
new or strange thing in this world or peculiar to 
ourselves ; that rather it is as ancient as man and 
belongs to our lot — why then I say we may well 
rise to the thought and belief that this thing., our 
200 


The Parting of Friends 

inevitable grief over a certain irreducible bitterness 
in human experience, is something which the Author 
of our being must have foreseen, something for which 
we may well believe there is a region of solace even 
here and now, and a region of most blessed com- 
pensations both here and in a world to come. 

It is a very sacred instinct, and one which we must 
not suspect or dishonour, the instinct to believe that 
in a world like this, where pain in one aspect or 
another awaits us all, provision has been made : 
and it is a great part of our Lord’s testimony 
concerning God and concerning life that in cherish- 
ing such an instinct we are not deceiving ourselves. 

What set my mind to this musing was that I had 
been reading again the story in “ Acts ” of S. 
Paul’s farewell to the Ephesian elders, at Miletus. 
What a scene of sheer beauty and tenderness ! It 
is the kind of thing which in a moment makes 
credible once more the great words that have been 
spoken concerning man. It is the kind of thing 
which occurring even now and then, and here and 
there, must strengthen God in His Promise to be 
patient with us all. 

These good men, elders of the Ephesian Church, 
accompanying the Apostle to the very ship, keeping 
back the last words to the very end, their helpless 
grief, the clinging to one another, the clinging 
together to God, and at last the actual physical 
separation — how deeply we all understand these 
things in these days. I am sure, too, that I have the 
201 


Our Ambiguous Life 

assent of all brave souls when I go on to say that 
bitter as that experience of parting was to S. Paul 
and to those warm-hearted friends of his, we feel, 
as we look on, that in some real way it was a good 
hour for them all. For at the root of every extreme 
feeling there is always already a touch of its opposite ; 
and in the bitterness of a separation there is already 
something more than bitterness, and something 
quite different from bitterness. Of course, it is 
too soon yet for calm or for the feeling of recon- 
ciliation : still in the very distress of parting there 
has come to us a new depth of love, a new tenderness, 
a new sense of God, and this, unless we are disloyal 
to our love, remains with us as the real experience 
and message of the parting hour. 

What is it that makes the parting from our friends 
a painful thing even when there is every prospect 
that we shall meet again after a few weeks or months ? 
What is it that we feel as we say good-bye, and watch 
some one being borne from us — the train moving 
slowly down the platform, or the ship moving away 
from its berth, whereupon the sea, never so bitterly 
the sea as at that moment, begins to show itself 
between us ? What is it that rises to our very lips 
at such a moment ? Perhaps it is that we feel then 
most poignantly how uncertain our life is ; what 
grave things may happen to us in the interval before 
we meet again. It may be that. But that is not 
the whole account of it. It is something deeper 
than any explanation. If it could be altogether 
202 


The Parting of Friends 

explained it would long since have been over- 
come, whereas it is never really overcome. 

No : at such a moment it is not the real parting 
that we feel ; it is other things ; it is everything. 
That shrinking from words, that helpless looking 
at each other across a gulf which, however narrow, 
is now impassable — what is it but the soul seeing 
for one moment more that it can bear ! What is 
it but perhaps the foretaste upon our lips of death 
itself ! 

Certainly there is no experience so well fitted 
to set us a-thinking seriously and religiously about 
this whole life of ours, as just the hour when we are 
parting or have parted from someone very dear to 
us. What truths come home to us at such a 
moment ! That man indeed does not live by bread 
alone ! That the real thing in man is just this high 
capacity of his, the source alike of his grandeur and 
of his gloom, this capacity of his for love ! How we 
understand too at such a moment the great saying 
Caritas est passio — love is an agony ! — that we are 
each of us alone and separate, and that our last 
hunger and cry is that we may not be alone ! “ Oh, 

that we might die in pairs or companies,” cried 
Faber, speaking for us all. 

Here then is one thing which we must, if we are 
honest, place on the credit side of the ancient 
controversy between faith and fear. This, namely, 
that there are some things which we could never 
have known if we had never bidden a farewell, 
203 


Our Ambiguous Life 

if we had never stood realizing our utter helplessness 
face to face with the difficulty of life, if we had 
never had to come away from the place of our parting 
condemned as we felt at the moment to take up our 
life again with such hope and resource as we are 
able to find in the depths of our own souls. 

In one of his papers. Mr. A. C. Benson tells a 
story which conveys the very thoughts that are in 
my mind at this moment. It illustrates, too, how 
we are poor judges of what is good for us, and how, 
as God sees us, the things which we consider in our 
life most disastrous may be the very things which 
simply had to be if we were ever to become what 
God would have us be and what in His great charity 
He sees that we are capable of becoming. 

“ The more one knows of the most afflicted lives, 
the more often the conviction flashes across us that 
the affliction is not a wanton outrage but a deli- 
cately adjusted treatment. A friend of the writer 
had sent him a rare plant which was set in a big 
flower pot, and placed close to a fountain-basin. 
It never throve ; it lived, indeed, putting out in 
the spring a delicate stunted foliage, though the 
friend, who was a careful gardener, could never divine 
what ailed it. He was away for a few weeks, and the 
day after he was gone, the flower-pot was broken 
by a careless garden-boy, who wheeled a barrow 
roughly past it ; the plant, earth and all, fell into 
the water ; the boy removed the broken pieces of the 
pot, and seeing that the plant had sunk to the 
204 


The Parting of Friends 

bottom of the little pool, never troubled his head 
to fish it out. When the friend returned, he 
noticed one da y in the fountain a new and luxuriant 
growth of some unknown plant. He made careful 
inquiries and found out what had happened. It 
then came out that the plant was in reality a water- 
plant, and that it had pined away in the stifling 
air for want of nourishment, perhaps dimly longing 
for the fresh bed of the pool ! Even so has it 
been, times without number, with some starving 
and thirsty soul, that has gone on feebly trying to 
live a maimed life, shut up in itself, ailing, feeble. 
There has descended upon it what looks at first 
sight a calamity, some affliction unaccountable 
and irreparable ; and then it proves that this was the 
one thing needed ; that sorrow has brought out 
some latent unselfishness, or suffering energized 
some unused faculty of strength and patience.” 

On the night on which as we know our blessed 
Lord was to be separated from His disciples, on the 
night before He died, He spoke long and seriously 
to them about this terrible business of human separ- 
ations. One will find it all in the last chapter of 
S. John. We can see very well what He was trying 
to do for them : what He did do for them, 
though they did not know it at the time. 
He was planting one or two thoughts, ideas, 
words in their minds, which would come back upon 
them, and, after the panic of His death had some- 
what subsided, would become their strength and 
205 


Our Ambiguous Life 

everlasting portion. I shall not dilate upon what 
Jesus said to help them, and to help us all who will 
none of us be spared soon or late this fundamental 
experience. Three things He said ; and, if we 
believe them, death has lost its sting. 

For one thing, He said : “ It is expedient for you 
that I go away.” That is to say, it is good for us that 
one day we separate. It discovers to us our true 
nature, it lets out our hearts, it breaks in upon our 
secular darkness and deadness. It gives the unseen 
world its chance with us. It wipes from the face of 
eternity the blur of temporary things. It throws 
open some long unused door, some everlasting door 
by which the King of Glory may come in. The 
dropping away from our side of a beloved form may 
do that, said Jesus, — ought to do that, is designed 
by God in order to do just that. 

The second thing which Jesus said on the night 
before He died was — When this thing happens to 
you “ let not your heart be troubled,” agitated, 
put off its centre. “ Believe ” — in God, in Me, in 
the future. 

And indeed that is what we have to do ; in a 
sense it is all we can do. In the deep places of our 
life, however, when we can say truthfully of some 
course that it is all we have, let us henceforth put 
a new note into that saying and declare not “ it is all 
we have,” but “ we have all that.” 

The third thing He said was, “ I will see 
you again.” “ I will see you again ” — that 
206 


The Parting of Friends 

is Christianity. If that be not true, I doubt 
whether in the long run the human heart will 
care to go much further, or to consent for ever 
to play the sorry part of a laughing-stock of time. 
But if that be true, “ I will see you again ” — then 
“ bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within 
me bless His Holy Name.” 


207 


XXIV 


THE SOUL AT EBB-TIDE 

In none of his Epistles do we get so much of S. 
Paul himself as in the Second Epistle to the 
Corinthians. In the other Epistles he is engaged for 
the most part in teaching Christian doctrine, in 
clearing away misunderstandings, refuting errors, 
or undermining the old prejudice and opposition 
of his readers. Not that the Apostle is ever merely 
formal. It is always a living man who is wrestling 
with an enemy. His letters are always the hot 
out-pourings of a man who is engaged with matters 
of life and death. Still, in those letters we see, at 
most, the Apostle as he appeared upon the plat- 
form, so to speak, and in support of a cause ; whereas 
in the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, it is his 
heart and flesh that cry out. For that reason, this 
Epistle may touch many who are not moved by his 
more formal writings. For that reason, too, all 
who feel what a hero Paul was, what a man he 
was, will turn to this letter to learn some things con- 
cerning him, which the world never knew. 

Because this is the most personal letter in the 
New Testament, it is the most intense and passionate. 
The Apostle puts off all restraint, his words rise and 
208 


The Soul at Ebb-Tide 


fall, he is tender or indignant, he flashes back a 
defiant challenge, and then again we feel he is on the 
edge of tears — signs these to all who have had a 
certain training that the man has had too much to 
bear. And this letter was written, indeed, at a 
crisis in Paul’s life, at a time of doubt and trouble, 
and bodily illness, at a time, that is to say, when things 
look blacker than they are, because we have no heart 
to face them. The last months of his stay in 
Ephesus and Asia Minor seem to have been the 
darkest and most difficult of his life. Those were 
the days when Paul was most near to giving way. 
Everything seemed to be conspiring against him. 
The Galatians had forsaken him. The church of 
Corinth seemed to be rent beyond all hope of healing. 
His old enemies — the Judaizers — were pursuing 
him, raising questions as to his authority and even 
as to his good name. The care of all the churches 
consumed him. He had no rest in his flesh. 
“ Without are battles,” so he tells us, and he goes 
on to tell us, “ within are fears.” On the top of 
all this, some mysterious danger, he tells us, had 
befallen him in Asia. He is very reticent about it. 
But he says that it was so grievous that it “ surpassed 
all bounds,” and was “ more than he could bear.” 
He thought he was dying. 

It was while he was in this state of bodily weakness 
that he heard of the condition of the Corinthian 
church. How the members were striving with one 
another. How gross irregularities had crept in. 

209 


14 


Our Ambiguous Life 

How instead of uniting to remove the scandal from 
their midst, the church had fallen into parties, 
which were discussing the most sacred matters, 
with such violence and disorder as might have 
filled Paul with contempt for them all. The 
Apostle learned these things, I say, when he himself 
was weak and nervous, and ready to think the worst 
of himself. For a moment he was tempted to give 
way. But he did not give way ; and when a man 
does not give way in face of such an outlook, when 
on the contrary he summons the last reserves of 
his strength, then a miracle always happens. For 
that man discovers that, in every good cause, our 
last reserves are nothing less than the Power of God. 
From being the weakest of men, that man becomes 
the strongest. Ah, it is when the soul is cast down 
into deep places, when all things seem contrary, 
when one is weak through illness, when he is for- 
saken, when he is misunderstood, when he is wrong- 
fully accused, it is in those night-times of the soul, 
in which a man must either find God or go down into 
despair, it is then, it is perhaps only then, that we can 
know the reality of such words as “ God,” and 
“ the Soul,” and “ faith.” Perhaps it is not possible 
for any of us to realize what we mean when we say 
we believe in God, until we have, once at least, tasted 
some last extremity, in which we had either to believe 
in God and live, or believe only in life’s darkness and 
go down. Well it was when the Apostle was in 
some such case, weak in body, nervous, easily 
210 


The Soul at Ebb-Tide 


excited, easily depressed, when a mere word, to 
which at other times he would have paid no heed, 
will cut him like a knife, it was then that he wrote this 
letter, wrote it swiftly, painfully, in anger, and, in 
passages, I can believe, in tears. 

“ There was given unto me,” he says, “ a 
thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet 
me, lest I should be exalted above measure. For 
this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might 
depart from me, and He said unto me : My grace 
is sufficient for thee, for My strength is made perfect 
in weakness.” 

Much has been written in order to decide if 
possible what the particular affliction was to which 
he gave this name. Perhaps we shall never know for 
certain. S. Paul himself has not told us. He 
calls it a “ thorn in the flesh ” : but that does not 
help us greatly. Still it does help us ; for S. Paul 
has the power of using words with very great exact- 
ness. Now we know that there are troubles which 
we should never think of referring to as “ thorns.” 
There are heavy overpowering troubles which we 
should speak of as “ burdens,” or “ shadows ” but 
not as “ thorns.” A thorn is a very personal thing : 
it is a secret. It lies buried in the flesh, unknown 
to others ; unknown, it may even be to our friends. 
There are times when it gives us no pain. But 
suddenly it will send a stound of pain through us, 
and we shall wince — we have come against some- 
thing perhaps, which suddenly reminded us of the 
211 


Our Ambiguous Life 

thing we bear in secret. A trouble, therefore, which 
one may forget for a time, and then suddenly remem- 
ber ; a trouble, which, on an instant, can cause the 
countenance to change, which can cause the blood to 
mantle on the cheek, or to die away leaving the face 
pale and in distress — that is at least the kind of 
trouble which one might fitly call a “ thorn.” 
Certainly there are troubles which we should speak 
of as clouds rather than as thorns, and S. Paul 
knew the difference between something that weighs 
us down and something that stings. 


It is natural to suppose that the affliction he 
refers to was a bodily ailment or disease. We know 
that S. Paul was not a robust man. He speaks more 
than once of his bodily weakness. Whether it was 
epilepsy or a weakness of the eyes, which troubled 
him, it may be held as certain that the Apostle did 
suffer from some constitutional malady. 

Now, other things being equal, this would answer 
very well to the trouble, which he describes here as 
a thorn. At times he would be strong enough and 
his spirits would rise, and labour would seem light 
to him. But suddenly the thorn would sting, a 
thrill of pain would pass through him, and his heart 
would sink ; for he knew what that throb of pain 
meant for him. 

Then he would remind himself that he was 
always carrying about with him something which 
212 


The Soul at Ebb-Tide 


would one day be too much for him. He speaks in 
one place of “ having the sentence of death within 
him,” and I am sure that he means more by that, 
than that like all others he will die. 

We ourselves may have noticed how a cloud may 
in a moment come over the face of one who knows 
that his health is at best a very precarious thing. 
Suddenly such a person will become quiet and 
preoccupied, and when you speak to him, he seems 
to have to summon his mind from far away. What 
is it ? Perhaps it is too sacred a thing for us to 
speak about. But most likely, something had 
reminded our friend of his abiding condition of 
insecurity, and for a moment he was fighting in the 
silence a lonely battle. 

And yet having said all this, I somehow cannot 
believe that it was a bodily affliction which S. Paul 
was thinking of. There is a temper and intensity 
about his reference which do not suit that idea. 
Had it been only some bodily ailment such as all 
flesh is heir to, I am sure that the Apostle would 
have restrained himself and from the first have 
looked upon it as the particular cross or discipline 
which God had seen proper to lay upon him. I am 
sure that he would have spoken with greater quietness 
about it. Whereas there is the note of resent- 
ment and impatience as though it was something 
for which he himself was at least partly to blame. 

213 


Our Ambiguous Life 

We must look then for another interpretation 
of “ the thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan 
to buffet me.” Let us look more inwardly. Let 
us see whether the Apostle did not suffer from some 
malady of the soul, from some cloud which kept 
floating in his sky, sometimes far away on the horizon 
indeed, sometimes thrust through with light, so 
that it increased the very glory of the heavens, 
sometimes coming very near, sometimes at a stand- 
still over his very head, hiding the ;face of God from 
him. 

One thing is certain, S. Paul held himself morally 
responsible for the murder of Stephen, as also for the 
persecution of the early church. We know that S. 
Paul had the kind of mind which never can forget. 
Those who are so constituted that they cannot 
forget the things that are past, may become the 
greatest saints ; for they always carry about with 
them the materials which any small thing may in a 
moment convert into a cleansing fire. Souls of 
this quality — souls which cannot forget their own 
past history, have indeed some splendid hours of 
soaring ; but they have their dark days, their intense, 
solitary musings, and they feel things which never 
visit the souls of ordinary men. S. Paul’s was such 
a mind. His was a mind which could cast up its 
own secret memories until it was as if the Evil Spirit 
was tormenting him. Yet there is no changing this 
kind of soul. You must let them alone at times : 
you must let them find their own way back to peace. 

214 


The Soul at Ebb-Tide 


You must let them live through their dark hours. 
Can we not see now and then the look of pain in the 
face of S. Paul, the light going out in his eyes, the 
whole man drooping as if something had given way 
within him ? As when he writes : “ I am not meet 
to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the 
Church of Christ.” And again : “ Lest after I 
have preached to others, I myself should be a cast- 
away.” And again : “ And many of the saints 

shut I up in prison, and w r hen they were put to 
death, I gave my voice against them.” 

We quote these words, not meaning to suggest 
that they represent the full mind of S. Paul. But 
we quote them to show that there was room for 
such thoughts as those within his soul. Darkness was 
a part of him, an element of his spiritual experience. 
It was as truly part of him as his faith was ; and the 
one was as needful to him as the other. 

Now it was not that he had any doubt as to God’s 
forgiveness of him. Nor was it that Paul had any 
fear of the retribution which might yet overtake 
him. Souls like his rather welcome the prospect 
of some fiery moral trial, which shall make clear to 
themselves for ever what kind of men they are. 

It may well be then that “ the thorn in the flesh, 
the messenger of Satan to buffet him,” was some- 
thing which came to him from the side of his 
conscience and memory. Like a dark wave it swept 
over him at times, and left him prostrate. It 
brought into his soul, not so much the sense of 

215 


Our Ambiguous Life 

humility as the sense of abjectness. It brought 
with it a feeling of confusion which checked the 
natural flow of his spirits, and made him contemptible 
in his own eyes. 

Now this, I should like to say, is a peculiarly 
subtle method of the Evil One. It is his master- 
stroke. “ I observed,” said Bunyan, “ that it was a 
favourite stroke of the Evil One to set a believer 
athinking of his sins.” In this kind of work Satan 
is transformed into an angel of light, and seems to be 
doing God’s work. But you will always know the 
difference by this test. If our recollection of our- 
selves serves to make us humble and hopeful and 
ready to serve Christ — then it is God who is stirring 
up our recollections. But if our memory is only 
having the effect of disabling us, making us feel 
confused, and impotent, and angry, and — from the 
point of view of a high life — useless, then it is not 
God, but the enemy of all souls. 

This then may have been S. Paul’s “ thorn in the 
flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet him.” “ A 
thorn ” — for it was secret and personal. “ A 
thorn,” for at times it did not trouble him. But 
suddenly, when he was tired, when he had suffered 
some defeat, when for other reasons he was disposed 
to think too meanly of himself, the old wound in 
his soul would bleed afresh. 

He was sure that it was “ the messenger of 
Satan to buffet him.” He felt, even when he was in 
the grasp of this intangible distress, that he was 
216 


The Soul at Ebb-Tide 


not himself, that he was in the hands of the enemy : 
he knew that he was not seeing things in God’s 
daylight, but seeing them rather as a sick man sees, 
who is tossing in a fever, who sees himself and the 
world and God, not sanely but with a kind of half- 
truth which is wholly untrue. He knew that he 
was wrestling with a falsehood which resembled the 
truth. 

As we have said, the Apostle himseif has not 
lifted the veil from his own secret. And although 
we are free to suggest what the thing may have 
been which so harassed him, and though it may 
be a profitable enough exercise for us to do so — 
because we ourselves may be carrying about some- 
thing which is to us a thorn ; nevertheless the 
silence of the Apostle is itself an instruction to us. 
It ought to mean for us that there is something 
which it is better for us to learn than the mere name 
of the affliction . He tells us very plainly what he 
did with his thorn so as to overcome the sting of 
it. He tells us how he made his thorn bud . He 
allowed it to take him nearer to God. And surely 
it is for this reason that thorns pierce ourselves 
and in the case of some, remain in our flesh, it may 
be for ever. Whether it be a bodily ailment, or 
a domestic shadow, or some personal fear, here at 
least is one use, we believe the very use, to which we 
all may put it. Through that thing which in secret 
troubles us, we may pass on as through a Holy 
Place, into the Holy of Holies where God dwells. 

2i 7 


Our Ambiguous Life 

That secret thing which presses upon us is our 
extraordinary means of grace. For we may be very 
sure that God has not laid anything upon us but what 
we would lay upon ourselves if we knew ourselves 
as He knows us, and were wise. 

And now, how does it all end ? 

“ For this thing I besought the Lord thrice 
that it might depart from me. And He said unto 
me, My grace is sufficient for thee, for my strength 
is made perfect in weakness.” 

There is an honesty about these words which 
is somehow more comforting to us than if we had 
read that when he prayed, the Lord removed the 
thorn. What happened is more like what we still 
see in human lives. The thorn remained. 

And just so the thing which is a thorn to us, 
may remain. The physical ailment, or the tendency 
to misgiving about ourselves — that may remain, 
that may not pass away even though we ask God to 
take it away. Perhaps, if we knew everything, and 
knew ourselves, we would not have it otherwise. 
But though God may not remove the thorn, He 
will help us to bear whatever pain it brings. And 
even if we cry out, it is to Him we cry. 

And that is not an evil which keeps us close to 
God. 

“ Lord remove this thorn.” And the Lord 
answered, “ My grace is sufficient for thee.” He 
is the same yesterday, and to-day and for ever. 
“ Cast thy burden on the Lord, and ” — He will 
218 


The Soul at Ebb-Tide 


remove thy burden ? Yes He may. But also, He 
may not. That is not the promise. “ Cast thy 
burden on the Lord — and He shall sustain thee” 
That is really better. For the great, the perfect 
response of God to our prayer is — not that He gives 
us this or that : but that He gives us Himself. 


219 


XXV 


“ AND AGAIN, PATIENCE ” 

Patience is the word for us after the first thrill has 
subsided, or when the road begins to rise. Isaiah, 
in describing what God could do for those who put 
their trust in Him, declared that they would 
“ mount up with wings as eagles/’ that they would 
“ run and not be weary,” and that they would “ walk 
and not faint.” In the days of our ignorance and 
inexperience, we thought that Isaiah had erred in 
literary tact ; that his words formed a kind of 
anticlimax — beginning on the note of victory, 
and ending on the note of accommodation and 
weakness. We used to think that it would have been 
a finer thing to say : “ They that wait upon the Lord 
shall walk and not be weary, they shall run and not 
faint, they shall mount up with wings as eagles ” — 
ending so to speak on the octave. But we live and 
learn. We can see now that in saying what he did 
say, Isaiah said a deeper thing. He said in effect, 
they that wait upon the Lord shall not only mount 
up with wings as eagles, that is to say they shall not 
only begin ; and they shall not only run and not be 
weary, that is to say they shall not only continue 
220 


“And again, Patience 


for a little while, but they shall walk and not faint ; 
they shall go on and on even when the music has 
ceased, when the sun has set, when the road is 
dark and heavy ; they shall go on enduring unto 
the end. 

Now, every great emotion passes through those 
various experiences : it begins, and it continues, and 
in the end it either dies, or it penetrates the 
sober faculties and responsibilities of life, becoming 
part and parcel of a man’s essential being, until 
he dies. 

Any one who can read between the lines — and a 
man is not reading at all who does not read between 
the lines, the whole truth of the matter lies between 
the lines, any one, I say, who can read between 
the lines will find in the New Testament everywhere 
indications that after the first generation of fidelity 
to the Risen Lord had passed, there came over the 
heart of the Church the mood which visits us all 
after the first outburst of emotion. They learned, 
as one of their own writers put it, that they had 
“need of patience.” And so, the characteristic 
words of the New Testament — and they are the 
words which seem to be the essential words for faith- 
ful men in a world like this — came to be such words 
as “ endure,” “ hold fast,” “ stand fast,” “ be 
patient,” “ wait on the Lord,” and so forth, words 
which signify quite clearly that at the moment the 
outward signs were strongly against them. They 
perceived that they could only survive as believers 
221 


Our Ambiguous Life 

by intensifying their faith. Unable, as we are all 
unable, to mould outward events in harmony 
with their faith, they perceived what we must also 
accept as the truth for ourselves — that the only 
other way of overcoming the world, of passing 
through and over its contradictions and delays, was 
to cherish and intensify their own inner spirit. 

Well now, of this I am quite sure for myself — 
it was out of this necessity that the early Church 
was moved to put upon record, for the support and 
patience of her members, the beautiful story of 
the life of her Lord — that He also was called upon 
by His Father to endure. That He also had to lift 
up His soul. That things weighed heavily upon 
Him. That He also had to penetrate them by faith, 
by falling back upon the pure fidelity of God. That 
He also died for the sake of something which He did 
not see accomplished, but which He saw planted in 
the soil of the human soul with an inevitable future. 
And I have no doubt all such references to the 
experience of their Master concluded with some 
fresh application of the words which He had spoken 
to them while He was in the flesh : “ As the Father 
hath sent Me into the world, even so send I you into 
the world.” 

When we recall with some freshness and precision 
the life of our Lord, it seems that the prevailing 
mood of that life was just this mood of patience. 
His patience with the multitude, with their poor 
ideals, ready to begin with them anywhere in the 
222 


“And again, Patience” 

hope that in communion with Him they might learn 
to leave all less worthy things, and come within 
sight of things more beautiful ! His patience with 
His disciples, with their worldliness also, their 
demand for public and immediate victories ; His 
readiness to begin anywhere with them also in the 
hope that in communion with Him they might come 
upon unsuspected loyalties within themselves, and 
become greater than they knew ! His patience 
with His kindred, with His mother and with His 
brethren, never doubting that one day they would 
understand His thoughts, and, it might be after 
He was departed, would, searching for Him with 
penitential tears, feel for and find the breast of His 
Father ! And in all these forms of patience, 
Christ’s wonderful patience, so to say, with God ! 
For what is patience with all life’s circumstances, 
and what is patience with ourselves, but aspects 
of that great patience which faith is, namely, 
patience with God ? 

There are moments in the life of Jesus when a 
fine impatience flashes from His eyes and throbs in 
His speech ; and such flashes serve to remind us of 
what otherwise we might not have supposed, that 
the general patience of our Lord’s behaviour was 
no easy or natural gift, but one which was secured 
for Him, as it is secured for any of us, by minimizing 
in His own soul the importance of subsidiary 
things, and magnifying continually the thought of 
God. 


223 


Our Ambiguous Life 

There is a form of patience which properly does 
not deserve the name, and certainly it has nothing 
in common with the patience of Christ.. There is 
an easy tolerance which is quite prepared to take no 
action of hostility or disapproval towards things that 
go on in this world ; this not because we think 
loftily of the possibilities of life, but because we think 
meanly and with contempt of life, either on the 
whole or in some partial aspect. There is the kind 
of patience which really is pure selfishness, the 
patience of one who is so engrossed with his own 
affairs that he is in no mind to trouble himself about 
other people’s affairs. There is the spurious patience 
which, if it had the courage, would explain itself 
in some such formula as “ most men are fools, and 
he is a wise man who lets things go their way ” ; 
or, “ what is the use of casting pearls before swine ? ” 
But that is not patience ; that is cynicism and con- 
tempt of man. True patience is an active quality 
of the mind. It is the opposite of passiveness. 
Patience, in fact, is more akin to passion than it is to 
apathy. Patience is a kind of elasticity and hope- 
fulness of the human soul which continually refreshes 
itself in the presence of something within us over 
which the depressing and threatening facts of life 
have no control. The true opposite of patience 
is not impatience or heat of the spirit, for patience 
manifests itself, when it is at its finest, not in damping 
but in keeping hot and eager some central fire of 
moral confidence. No : the true opposite of 
224 


“And again, Patience” 

patience is cowardice, bitterness, weariness, despon- 
dency, resignation, contempt of man. The patience 
which is according to Christ is that straining and 
effort of the soul against all tendencies towards faint- 
ing, or fatigue, or sadness, or heaviness, or relapse, or 
bitterness, or anger, or sullenness and cynicism. 
“ They murmured in their tents, and hearkened 
not unto the voice of Moses ; they bethought 
themselves not of the pleasant land towards which 
they went.” 

That is the true opposite of the patience of 
Christ. It will be enough to convince us that 
patience in the New Testament is altogether 
opposed to slackness and inactivity, to quote 
such a saying as must have come quite naturally 
to the writer in the New Testament who bids 
us “ run our race with patience looking unto 
Christ.” 

I believe that, when you examine the matter 
deeply you will find that in the last analysis patience 
is a form of unselfishness. It is the kind of mood 
which people have who see life as a very big thing, 
because they see God in life. Thus you have the 
phrase “ the patience of the saints ” : and the 
patience of the saints is just their self-effacement, 
their disregard and repudiation of their own 
personal likings out of respect for the great interest 
of God. 

Patience, to see all this from another point of view, 
is the only true victory of the soul. It is the triumph 
225 


15 


Our Ambiguous Life 

over circumstances by the adjustment of our soul 
to circumstances, not compromising our soul by 
any low engagement to circumstances, but seeing 
our soul and our circumstances all within the light of 
God’s inviolable good-will. But patience, I say, is 
victory; it is the transforming of the world by faith. 
It is the incorrigibleness of the spirit, baffled it may be 
in its outlook, assailed by circumstances, yet out- 
flanking those circumstances by some wider sweep 
of imagination and hope. Once again, patience is 
victory, because it is adjustment ; it is adjustment 
of the soul of man to the world of facts which is 
about him. It is, that is to say, a correspondence 
by which we live and survive. 

S. James has a pregnant phrase which has an 
application here ; I mean the phrase “ dead, 
being alone.” A thing, said S. James, is dead when 
it is alone, when it is by itself, when it is unrelated, 
unadjusted, out of correspondence with its sur- 
roundings. A seed, for example, is dead when it 
lies on the hard surface of a rock, out of vital relation 
with the soil which would lay open its hidden 
faculties and resources and thus introduce the seed 
to its proper destiny. One might take up that illus- 
tration and develop it, with a certain ingenuity I 
confess, but still with a real and solid parallel in the 
facts of our deepest life. For example, how does 
a thing by itself, and a thing which by itself is dead, 
come into relation with those circumstances which 
alone discover and develop its inherent vitality ? 

226 


“And again, Patience 


How does a seed come into contact with that river 
of life which flows through all things ? How does a 
seed become a plant, a flower, a tree with fruit and 
foliage ? A seed gets into connection with the 
vital qualities of the surrounding world through the 
medium of a certain moisture . In the case of living 
things in this world, contact is attained by 
moisture. And for human souls the great contacts 
come always by the way of some fine tenderness, 
by the way of some confessed weakness and 
necessity. It is through the spirit of tears that 
human souls are deeply knit to one another, and are 
knit to God. 

A seed, that is to say, survives, which is patient of 
circumstances, which lies in the dark alone, appar- 
ently the victim of things, but all the time smiling 
in secret knowing its inherent vitality. A seed 
survives by appearing to surrender for a time. For 
a day, for a week, for a month, it lies there waiting, 
assailed by the darker things about it, all the time 
knowing that it has that within itself which shall 
master and use and reject those dark things, and that 
it will one day look up into the blue sky and the sun. 
“ In a slow world like this,” says a good man, “ the 
man who can wait is the man who wins, for it is he 
who survives.” 

In many aspects of patience we are invited to 
emulate our Lord who bore hard things, cherishing, 
as He did, our inner and incontrovertible faith. 
When things outside are too much for us we are to 
22 7 


Our Ambiguous Life 

look within ; and, when things within us are too 
confused, we are to look abroad and upwards to the 
heavens. When we suffer wrongfully at the hands 
of men, we are to behave with dignity as did our 
Lord, and we are to remind ourselves of Him who 
judgeth righteously. When hope dies within us, 
when some dear prospect delays and our heart within 
us faints with longing, we are to bestir ourselves 
in some practical activities. By means of this 
fidelity and exactness in the details of our personal 
life, we believe God will pour in that gentle balm 
of consolation which reaches us by the way of our 
private excellence and integrity. And when things in 
in the world are too formidable, when they are dark 
beyond all arguments, we are to recover that forti- 
tude of the soul which patience is, by moving up 
to the side of Christ. 

But there is a region of patience in which we 
cannot be said to imitate our Lord ; for He had no 
need of it. I mean, patience with ourselves, 
patience with our ups and downs, our moods and 
feelings, our fluctuating impulses, not thinking too 
meanly of ourselves, but thinking firmly and 
honestly of ourselves ; not consenting indeed to 
these disabling changes, and yet not allowing them 
to confuse the central parts of our life. But we 
must be patient with ourselves, in this sense, that 
we must accept ourselves. We must not indeed 
consent to ourselves, but we must accept ourselves. 
We must accept ourselves as a task, as an 
228 


“And again, Patience” 

opportunity, as a means of grace ; as a vocation, 
even as a mother might accept God’s hard gift to her 
of a child who must always be delicate in body, or 
harder still, delirious in mind. “ Soyez douce d toi ,” 
said a great and severe saint, S. Frangois de Sales — 
“ deal tenderly with yourself.” Be patient with 
yourself. Deal in certain moods humorously with 
yourself, playfully even, teasing yourself, making 
sport of yourself. Try to think how ridiculous you 
look when you are angry ; how ugly you look when 
you are cruel ; what a sound your voice has when 
you are bitter and unkind. 

Do we not remember how, when we were 
children, when something had vexed us — or 
perhaps we were in pain, or had been chastised — 
we found relief in tears : how our grief at the time 
seemed inconsolable. And do we not remember 
how we went on weeping long after there was any great 
need for it — until suddenly we heard the sound of 
our own voice, and began to reflect, though we were 
children, that we were really not suffering so 
much as we were pretending. And then, at such a 
moment we lifted up our tear-stained faces and saw 
ourselves in a mirror : whereupon the sight of us 
seemed so grotesque and amusing that suddenly all 
the darkness of the world passed away and life 
once again seemed to us quite a tolerable and even 
a happy place. 

Now there are some things we can do for our- 
selves which no other one can do for us. When our 


229 


Our Ambiguous Life 

mind is diseased, said Shakespeare, the patient must 
minister to himself. 

Be patient ; nay, be fair. Think again. You 
can hold out a little longer ; and you never know 
what is round the corner. 


230 


XXVI 


“LORD, TO WHOM SHALL WE GO?” 

There is many a way of putting the case for Christ : 
this question puts it in its own way. It says, in 
effect, that if we give up Christ, we give up every- 
thing. If Christ is not true and final, then nothing 
is true and final for which we ought greatly to care. 
If we may not go to Christ — then, to whom shall we 
go ? What are we to do, who have come so far 
under His benediction ? To whom are we to turn ? 
How are we going to manage — in the lonely business 
of our life ? With what answer shall we hence- 
forth silence the innuendos of our lower nature, 
and confute the dreary arguments of death ? Lord, 
to whom shall we go ? 

The passage in which these words occur describes 
the moment when the disciples lost the first gaiety 
of their faith. From this moment they are children 
no more. They had come to the wicket-gate where 
that which is natural, if it is not to die for ever, 
must be crushed as it passes into that which is 
spiritual. 

Jesus had told them that He was about to leave 
them, and that, in one sense, for ever. He had 
broken it also to them that something very trying 
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Our Ambiguous Life 

was about to befall them. That they would not 
only be separated, but would be asked to meet 
troubles and persecutions, and that they would have 
to find their own way — knowing Him indeed but 
not seeing Him. 

And Jesus looked at these men, watching the effect 
of His words. It was then, as Peter and the rest 
stood hesitating — not hesitating whether to abandon 
Him or not, but simply hesitating, hesitating as to 
how to feel, it may be, waiting to hear whether Jesus 
would send them back to their homes and occupations, 
— it was then that Jesus broke the silence and gave 
an outlet to the rising flood of their hearts. “ Will 
ye also go away ? ” He asked. “ Will ye also — ye 
who have known Me, to whom I have disclosed My- 
self as I have not to the world, will ye also go away ? ” 
And from the very human Peter, the answer came 
swiftly back, with the passion and the justice of an 
instinct, “ Lord, to whom shall we go ? ” 


The accent is upon the “ we : ” “ Lord, to whom 
shall we go ? ” I believe that that was what Peter 
meant. It was as though he said : “ Lord, those 
others may well forsake thee ; they do not know 
Thee. It may be true of them, as Thou hast said, 
that they followed Thee for the sake of the loaves. 
But we are different. What are we to do who have 
come to love Thee ? How are we to go back to our 
life without Thee, who have known what it is to 
232 


“Lord, to whom shall we go?” 

have Thee ? It is well for them to give Thee up 
who never had Thee : they do not know the 
intolerable difference. But we are not like them. 
Thou hast taught us to love Thee. Nay, Thou hast 
compelled us to love Thee. And now to whom shall 
we go if we may go no longer with Thee ? What 
shall we do with this great faculty of love toward 
Thyself which Thou hast created within us, which 
Thou hast encouraged, and, until this moment, 
hast satisfied ? Before we knew Thee, or knew our- 
selves, we might have gone on faring as we fared. 
But that old life is past for ever. We have seen 
what we have seen. Lord, Thou shouldst not have 
looked at us if Thou didst not mean that we should 
love Thee ! ” 


It is easy, we must believe — for they declare it — 
for some people to do without Christ. But there 
are others. For some of us Jesus Christ is identi- 
fied for ever with our own moral self-respect, with 
our entire outlook. He has become for us that One 
without whom nothing is as it promised to be, 
without whom even the most glorious movement 
of the human spirit has no stability or significance. 

It may be that there are those who can be all 
that they would like to be, without the ancient faith 
in Him. But, once more, there are others who are 
different. Christ always knew that there would be 
these others. He desired no name and no honour 


233 


Our Ambiguous Life 

at the hands of men, higher or holier than their 
experience of Him warranted. He would not have 
formal honours while He was with us in the body. 
He refused to be crowned by careless hands. He 
knew that He would not be without the Highest 
Name so long as man out of the depths might look 
to Him. If men will go away ; well, when all is 
said, it is their own business. We know one 
thing — it is for us to stay. We know that in our case 
we are without a sanctuary, without a last Retreat 
and Inspiration, without a footing in the maze, 
until we see Christ in God, and God in Christ. 
Let us but turn from Him in any matter of the 
soul, and — is it not as though we had done something 
dark ? Others there may be who have none of these 
private checks and misgivings. They may not 
know what it is, seeing Christ by faith, to feel the 
favour or the frown of God. But in that case, it is 
their own business, their own problem. We are 
different — by birth it may be, or by training, or 
by the effect of life upon our spirits, by the election, 
that is to say, of God. 

Others may not see His Glory, even as strangers 
might disregard some portrait in our home, because 
it means nothing to them. But it is our treasure : 
we know the dear face ; it is mixed up for ever with 
our history. 

We cannot speak for others ; least of all can we 
speak for those who loudly protest that we shall not 
speak for them. But we may speak for ourselves. 

234 


“Lord, to whom shall we go?” 

Nay, there are times when we must speak for 
ourselves. And speaking for ourselves, this is what 
we say : “ We find and adore in Jesus Christ that 
substance for our heart and mind, that basis of all 
Faith and Hope and Love, that Holy Meaning and 
Foundation for life — which it was the object of all 
the confessions to claim for Him.” For in declaring 
Jesus Christ to be the Son of God, the Church, 
if we consider the matter well, is not defining His 
nature. Rather is she refusing to define it. She 
is but declaring that no limit shall be placed upon 
that inherent quality of His person which is this : 
— that, given freedom, He will transcend all our 
human measures and will still elude us and go before 
us in every increasing apprehension of God. Once 
more, there are those who, if we must believe them, 
are able to bear up against life without such a 
Rock for their feet. But once again, there are 
others; and they form the Church of Jesus Christ 
in the world. 


235 


XXVII 


CHRIST’S INEVITABLE PRESTIGE 

Perhaps we are in error when we lament those who 
die young. To our natural sense, when a fine life 
stops short, on the threshold, it seems to us to be 
almost an error on the part of God ; but that cannot 
be. Certainly for us Christians such an idea is 
forbidden ; for surely that must never be regarded 
by us as an untoward fate which was shared by our 
Lord Himself. Certainly there is one advantage 
which those who pass out of life before the natural 
term have over us who linger on into old age and 
weariness. Of those who pass away into the other 
world earlier than we would have chosen for them, 
we may say not so much that they have died as that 
they have laid down their life. Our own Stevenson 
has a beautiful passage, full of consolation for those 
who are left behind and who might lament unduly 
the loss of friends or children who are called upon 
to lay down life before the time. He speaks with 
a kind of envy of those who, in the mid-time of their 
career and on the tip-toe of being, their spirit eager 
and inquiring, shoot into the spirit-land. 

Jesus laid down His life at thirty-three, and for 
some time before the event — how long we cannot 
236 


Christ’s Inevitable Prestige 

say — He knew that it was inevitable. We are 
permitted, especially in S. John’s Gospel, to look into 
the very soul of Jesus in those last days, and to over- 
hear a kind of dialogue between His soul and God. 
It is an amazing revelation. No anger, no bitterness, 
but only peace and quietness and gratitude ; a slight 
touch of weariness, perhaps, and gladness that since 
the thing had to be, it was not now going to be 
delayed. He thanks God that He has lived : in 
itself a very wonderful thing for One whom life 
had dealt with so unkindly. In His own phrase, 
He thanks God “ that He has known Him ” — and to 
know God we must live. He is happy knowing 
certain things which He can say with a firmness and 
assurance such as perhaps no one in the world but 
Himself was ever good enough to claim without 
offending us who should hear Him make the claim. 
He could say, for example, “ I have finished the 
work which Thou gavest Me to do.” What a 
thing that is for anyone to be able to say, and to 
be able to say at thirty-three ! Some day I must 
write of that. At the moment I wish to speak 
of another claim which in the same dialogue our 
Lord makes in that final manner of His which raises 
no question in our minds. “ Those whom Thou 
hast given Me I have kept, and not one of them 
is lost.” 

That was a great claim. Perhaps there are some 
of us who, better than others, realize what a great 
claim it is. How hopelessly even the best of us fall 
237 


Our Ambiguous Life 

short ! Every word in which Jesus expresses this 
mood of His soul is worthy of our pondering. 
“ Those whom Thou hast given Me ” : that, for 
example, of itself is a phrase which sets us thinking. 
It is a phrase and idea very familiar to S. John. 
For in S. John’s Gospel, at least so it seems to me, 
our Lord is always described as knowing that in this 
world there would be those who should not attend 
to anything He was saying, but there would be those 
also who should. He does not speculate about this 
apparent difference in human souls. He simply 
declares that so it is ; and so it is indeed. It is a 
simple matter of fact, of observation, of experience, 
that there are those who are sensitive and responsive 
to the finer appeals of life : and there are those who 
at least do not give any notable sign that they are 
thus sensitive and responsive. We are not raising 
the question at all as to whether or not both types 
of human beings are necessary for the whole business 
of life. We are far from raising the question as to 
which type of soul has the more enviable career 
in this world ; still less as to which of the two will 
inherit the fairer destiny. Once again, we are 
only saying that so it is. There are those who feel 
things so powerfully that their feelings control 
their action ; and there are those who, to say no 
more, seem to be able to dictate to their feelings in 
the name of prudence. There are those on the one 
hand who, when deeply touched, must go all the way; 
and there are others who, if touched at all, are 
238 


Christ's Inevitable Prestige 

able to resist ; or, yielding for a short space, they do 
not go far, and later they turn back. 

It would seem from the reading of S. John’s 
Gospel that as time went on in those brief years 
of His public ministry, our Lord came to accept 
this fact of the matter as God’s will for Him : that 
there would be those who should listen and be moved 
by Him, who should feel in a measure what He felt 
to such a depth, those for whom in consequence 
life would never be quite the same, but henceforth 
a finer, more beautiful thing, not happier perhaps, 
but deeper and greater, with insights into eternity ; 
and that it was amongst these that He, Jesus, should 
make His friends — that these were they whom God 
had given Him. 

Now, it is something which, in a way, we can all 
of us say — that there are those whom God has given 
us, those among whom we are to exert our 
influence. They know us ; we know them. We 
have seen each other in revealing moments. It 
is a test of our essential character on both sides 
whether by the very process of life we shall lose each 
other. To lose those whom God has given us — 
what a tragedy that is ! The human soul has 
declared through its literature in all ages and in all 
countries, that the most poignant thing in all the 
world is when parents lose a child. I am not think- 
ing at the moment of losing a child by death. That, 
from the point of view of our religion, is not losing 
a child ; that is letting a child go back to God earlier, 
239 


Our Ambiguous Life 

we meaning to follow and to meet again. I am not 
thinking of that, and the great literature of which 
I speak is not thinking of that. But to lose a child 
in the sense of to have lost hope of a child, to have 
lost a child’s love or respect, or that the child can 
go away and begin a life in forgetfulness of what 
we should have wished him or her to be, and to leave 
us alone — that has always been a subject of 
acknowledged pathos. 

We ministers in our own way know, as perhaps 
others can hardly know, what it is likewise to lose 
those concerning whom we thought that God had 
given them to us. And sometimes even with the 
applause of a world that knows us less intimately 
we remain unwarmed, because we know that in that 
closer region we have failed. There were those who 
seemed at one time to be touched by our message, 
those who seemed to be helped towards the solution 
of some personal problem, or encouraged to take up 
some distasteful burden, because of something we 
seemed to enable them to see beneath the surface 
and in God. But time has passed ; circumstances 
have changed ; and on one side or on the other, 
or on both, there has been some secret failure, 
so that now they stand apart ; those whom God had 
given us we have lost. 

When we look, however, at the facts, we may 
comfort ourselves, though we must take care that we 
do not deceive others. Our Lord claimed that 
those whom God had given Him He had kept ;^and 
240 


Christ's Inevitable Prestige 

yet how had He kept them ? Judas betrayed 
Him : that is admitted indeed in our Lord’s next 
words. Peter also denied Him. All the disciples 
in the day of the Cross forsook Him and fled. On a 
superficial reading of the facts, therefore, we feel 
that what Jesus meant when He claimed that those 
whom God had given Him He had kept, must be 
something which is not apparent on the surface. 
What was it ? It is this, and it is a wonderful 
thing, a thing which is there to console us all, 
parents and friends and ministers, all who have been 
on deep intimacies, which intimacies have seemed 
for a time to be qualified or to be broken. It is 
this : that if we have ever dealt with each other’s 
soul deeply, the influence of that is something which 
is indestructible. It may for a time seem to have 
entirely gone : but what is time to the life of the 
soul ? What has been, will be. The light that did 
burn, will burn. No good begun can ever pause. 
Our Lord, who knew very well, for He had warned 
them that so it would be, that they would all forsake 
Him and flee, nevertheless had the insight, the con- 
fidence in God, to say that not one of them had He 
lost. He knew that they would all come back. 
The deepest is the surviving thing. They are the 
fine strains that reach the furthest ; the coarser, 
more brassy instruments have only a very local 
range. The flutes and violins penetrate, so that a 
note on one or the other lingers on, it may even be, 
through eternity. 


24 1 


16 


Our Ambiguous Life 

I repeat, He knew they would all come back. 
And they all came back with shame, with anger at 
themselves, with indignation at their stupidity 
and blindness. They all came back. He knew, 
what they did not know, that He had sown some- 
thing deep down in the loam of their souls which 
would work up to the surface and control them. 
And that is Christ’s great hope, His great belief, in 
the human heart. All that Christ asked of the world 
wherewith to save it, said Lamennais, was a Cross 
whereon to die. “ I, if I be lifted up from the earth, 
will draw all men unto Me.” It is as though He had 
said, “ If I lay down My life In love for them, they 
may not understand for a long time ; but they will 
understand. Life will deepen them, will cleanse 
their eyes of feverish things, and they will see and 
they will return.” 

And this is the hope of Christ in the life and 
ministry of His Church. We have only one business 
and that is to keep alive in the minds of men the 
story of this One who thought so greatly of them. 
With this in His heart He ordained the Sacrament of 
bread and wine. He asked us to “ remember ” Him 
— in the sublime belief that as we recalled Him there 
would come over us one by one a tenderness, a 
tenderness caused it might be by the facts of life, by 
the play of memory, but in any case a tenderness ; 
and in that mood of tenderness it would one day 
dawn upon us that this great love of God in Christ 
has its meaning for us one by one, and that, as the 
242 


Christ’s Inevitable Prestige 

blessed consequence of it all we, who for years had 
been permitting all manner of secondary things to 
hinder our true life, should suddenly become aware 
of remoter, deeper, nobler things, and return to 
our Father. 


243 


XXVIII 


“IF IT WERE NOT SO!” 

Perhaps there is no moment when our heart 
turns so completely to God as it does when for one 
reason or another we have been in darkness of spirit, 
dwelling as we now perceive we had been, in an 
atmosphere of denial and atheism. For souls of a 
certain kind, no experience has such power to fling 
them upon the breast of God, as simply to have faced 
for an hour or for a day the terrible alternative 
to the Christian faith — the alternative from the 
desolation of which our Lord here raises the veil in 
the words, “ If it were not so.” “ If the light that 
is in a man,” said Jesus once upon a time, “ become 
darkness, how great is that darkness ! ” 

That, however, is not the matter which at 
the moment is in my mind. There are some things, 
said S. Paul, which must not even be mentioned 
amongst us ; and the very possibility that in trusting 
ourselves to Christ, trusting ourselves, that is to say, 
to the highest hypothesis that has ever been offered 
to human existence we might be eternally wrong, 
misguided, self-deluded, is one of those matters 
which I hold should not even be mooted. Madness 
lies that way I The Christian Church in her 
244 


“If it were not so!” 

doctrines and sacraments has done well to put an 
arrest upon all too venturesome voyages of the 
human spirit into the region of the absolute ; recom- 
mending her members, and upon occasion command- 
ing them, not to try to get behind or beyond Jesus 
Christ, but always to deal with Him as the only and 
all-sufficient mediator between ourselves, with our 
sin and ignorance, and the absolute truth of things. 

We sometimes speak and we often think of the 
things which Jesus left unsaid, of the questions 
which He did not charge Himself to answer, of the 
mysteries in human life from which He did not 
altogether lift the veil, so that even now, with all the 
light He gave us, we still live in a world of broken 
arcs and of hopes that stop short this side of 
certainty. Jesus confessed to His disciples that there 
were matters on which He had omitted to speak, 
though at the same time He promised that with 
regard to those very matters they would not be left 
in ignorance, but would be taught otherwise than by 
word of mouth ; that a spirit would descend upon 
them after He in bodily form had gone, and that that 
spirit would urge them on and light up their path. 

We may have wondered why Jesus did not speak 
plainly and definitely upon features in the human 
situation which have in all ages troubled men, 
which, as is even alleged, have hindered faith in some 
and have destroyed it in others. We might counter 
the difficulty arising from that aspect of life by 
asking how there could be faith at all if everything 
245 


Our Ambiguous Life 

were plain. But the fact is that Jesus was silent 
upon many things ; and surely we can see reason 
upon reason for His silence. The reticence of 
Jesus in His earthly life was not greater than, and 
was indeed of the same quality as, the reticence of 
God throughout eternity. Jesus was in no haste to 
say all that He might have said. He seemed always 
to know that He had all the ages in which to reveal 
God and truth to the human race. 

And again : it may have been that Jesus left 
many things in their natural silence and mystery 
in order to provoke and quicken thought and to 
secure that our thinking shall always have a certain 
tenderness and humility, that indeed it shall always 
be qualified by faith. For the darkness which lies 
about the world is surely a reason for us walking 
softly and, as it were, with our hand in His hand 
Who alone of all the sons of men, face to face with the 
conceivably worst, nevertheless had no fear. Much 
darkness remains about us and on the horizons — 
perhaps with this very intention, that we should 
keep close to Him as we go through our appointed 
lot of sunshine and shadow, struggling with our 
ignorance and our moral weakness, the victims, 
meanwhile, as it appears, of ceaseless changes and of 
inevitable death. The poetry of the human race 
is full of this acknowledgment of our indebtedness 
to the unexplained facts of life for all the liveliness 
and kindliness of the human soul. 


246 


“If it were not so!” 


If none were sick and none were sad, 

What service could we render ? 

I think if we were always glad 
We scarcely could be tender. 

Did our beloved never need 
Our patient ministration, 

Earth could grow old and lose indeed 
Its sweetest consolation. 

If sorrow never claimed our heart 
And every wish were granted, 

Patience would die and hope depart, 

Life would be disenchanted.” 

“ If it were not so I would have told you.” 
When we turn that sentence about, it begins to be 
more luminous. “ I have not told you , therefore it 
is according to your own warm instinctive hwnan hope 
and belief” It is as though Christ had said to us, 
“ If there is for you any problem or mystery in 
human experience about which I have not spoken in 
particular, in that case let your own heart and flesh 
cry out. Believe the best and never doubt that 
it is according to your faith. If hope had been 
finally barred, I should have forbidden you to hope.” 
To put the same thing otherwise : if there is any- 
thing in the general life of man or in our own 
experience about which it seems to us that Christ 
has not given any distinct word or interpretation, 
in that case we are to let our general faith and 
hope in God, as we see God in Christ, deal with this 
thing which is perplexing us. We are to trust the in- 
stinct of faith. We are to see the thing which is 
causing us anxiety or grief in the light of the whole 

247 


Our Ambiguous Life 

character and intention of God as these are to be seen 
in Jesus Christ, or as they are to be inferred from the 
whole fact and appearance of Him in this world. 
“ If it were not so . . If, that is to say, life at 
the end is destined to present some final contradiction 
to the holy and believing hypothesis, Christ pledges 
His honour He would have forbidden us from the 
very outset to indulge in hope. 

Christ has pledged Himself that the impression 
which He makes upon us is the very truth ; that 
the impulse to believe in God to all lengths which 
He inspires and encourages, is the very energy of 
God Himself within us one by one. The hopes 
which visit us because we see Christ here in our 
midst are true hopes. Whatever light or strength 
we draw from Christ we may trust utterly ; we 
may yield ourselves to it without reserve, for it i9 
rooted in God and in the nature of things. 

Now what are some of the hopes and reinforce- 
ments and lofty interpretations which Christ 
conveys invincibly to our minds ? What is the total 
truth, the spiritual background, out of which He 
speaks and acts and comes to us, even as the waves 
which lap our shores have behind and within them 
the throb of the great ocean ? “ For,” said Jesus, 

“ whatever you feel when you are near Me, trust 
it. Hold on to it. Take up your life in the glow 
of it. Endure the contradiction of experience, 
and in the end the silence of the grave, in the memory 
and the promise of it. Let out your hearts freely to 
248 


“If it were not so!” 


it. Make it your joy and your song ; if it were not 
so I would have told you ! ” 

The first, and it remains the overwhelming 
impression which Christ conveys to our spirit, is, 
that God is ; that there is a whole world round 
about us and pressing in upon us : that the Kingdom 
of Heaven is near, not near in point of date, but 
near, so to speak, in space, impending, overhanging, 
surging round us, waiting like a tide for creeks and 
inlets and all the time making those very creeks and 
inlets. 

That is surely the first idea that Christ awakens 
in any honest mind. Looking at Him, we infer 
a kind of world-order of which He is the radiant 
exponent ; a kingdom of God of which He is the 
accredited ambassador. When Robinson Crusoe 
saw the footprint on the sand, he knew, as confi- 
dently as though he had already seen him, that there 
was another human being on the lonely island. 
In every hearty and uncorrupted mind it is an 
inevitable inference of faith that a world which has 
felt the peculiar and supernatural pressure of Jesus 
Christ is no homeless island in the depths of space, 
but a world dear and precious in the sight of God. 

And further, everyone who, as he looks upon 
Jesus Christ, becomes sure of God, begins in that 
moment to be very sure also of a world beyond this 
world, a world nearer than is this world to God’s 
idea. Jesus Christ, who is our security for God, is 
our security for God’s future in us and over us. 

249 


Our Ambiguous Life 

Some people in our day want certain further 
securities. I am ashamed of them ! Jesus Himself 
lived constantly by the inspiration of a real future 
which was not so much in front of Him as already 
all about Him. It was that future, that surrounding 
encompassing world, which in His case gave to the 
present world its only worth and actuality. 

In saying these things we have been simply 
bringing home to ourselves the implications of our 
Lord’s most delicate and satisfying assurance. 
“ Show us the Father and it sufficeth us,” said 
Philip ; to whom Jesus replied, and not to Philip 
only but to all those in every age and in our own 
who, like Thomas, would seem not to be able to 
believe until they can thrust their hands and turn 
them in the very flesh of Jesus : “ Have I been so 
long with you and yet hast thou not known Me, 
Philip ? ” Christ bids us take Him as God’s security 
for everything worth living for and dying for. 
He bids us draw every blessed conclusion that is 
competent from the great fact that He came 
amongst us, that He has been here, that, knowing 
our worthlessness and feeling the brutality of our 
reception of Him, He nevertheless went on loving 
us until we killed Him. Whereupon the tide turned 
in the very heart of God, and heaven sent us the one 
palpable demonstration of the victory of the spirit 
over death. Jesus did not rest in His grave. With 
Him as cornerstone, His total experience of God, 
250 


“If it were not so!' 


first and last, from the cradle to the grave, and 
beyond the grave to the great sky which bends over 
yearning and honourable souls ; with all that as 
foundation and cornerstone, we are to build to any 
length and breadth and height, using only at each 
stage the plummet of His qualifying spirit. If it 
were not so, said He, I would have told you. 

“ I am persuaded,’’ said Paul in a kind of intoxi- 
cation of faith such as comes upon ourselves in some 
fine hour when our whole heart goes out to Christ 
without reservation, “ I am persuaded that neither 
death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor 
powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor 
height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be 
able to separate us from the love of God which is 
in Christ Jesus our Lord.” 

In Ferishtah's Fancies Browning clinches each 
argument with a kind of song : the song, the very 
fact that we sing at all, is part of the argument. 
Here are some snatches of the great song which 
keeps up the heart of man. 

“ Those who have truly heard the word of Jesus 
can bear His silence.” So wrote S. Ignatius. 

So long as there be just enough 
To pin my faith to, though it hap 
Only at points ; from gap to gap 
One hangs up a huge curtain so 
Grandly, nor seeks to have it go 
Foldless and flat along the wall, 

What care I if some interval 

Of life less plainly may depend 

On God f Pd hang there to the end.” 

251 


Our Ambiguous Life 

So wrote Robert Browning, who also wrote : 

It’s wiser being good than bad, 

It’s safer being meek than fierce : 

It’s fitter being sane than mad. 

My own hope is, a sun will pierce 
The thickest cloud earth ever stretched 
That after Last returns the First 
Though a wide compass round be fetched ; 

That what began best can’t end worst, 

Nor what God blest once, prove accurst.” 

But what better armour for the breast of man is 
there than this, so simple that a child may wear it, 
and of such stuff that it will serve us to the end 
and at the end : 

“ His love in time past 
Forbids me to think 
He’d leave me at last 
In troubles to sink.” 


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DISCERNING THE TIMES 

By John A. Hutton, D.D. 

Second Impression , Crown 8 to, CM ‘Boards, 7s. 6d. net. 

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master in tracking the subtler movements and hidden motives of the soul 
and his luminous analysis and earnest appeals are presented with a literary 
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“ This is one of the rare books of addresses which are read right through 
with delight, not only because of their clear and honest thinking, but also 
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THE PERSISTENT WORD 
OF GOD 

By John A. Hutton, D.D. 

Crown 8 yo. Cloth Boards , 5 s. net. 

“ The book will add to Dr. Hutton’s already high reputation, and everyone 
who reads it cannot but find it stimulating and helpful, as well as instructive.” 

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“ Dr. Hutton provides us with a fresh treatment of the story of Jonah, 
bringing to bear on that much-abused book the light of recent knowledge, 
and rescuing from the obloquy brought upon it by the literalist one of the 
finest of the minor prophetic characters.” — The Glasgow Herald. 

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Many readers will find this powerful exposition both attractive and inspiring.” 

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